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.

the man with the panama hat

He reminded us of the Curious George books. When our electricity was down during a bad storm, he came and inspected the electric box. There was something different about him. There was, in a manner of speaking, light coming out of him. An energy of soft-spoken, kindly goodwill. As if he'd already fixed our problem before he'd begun to look at it.

After he left, the lights came on inside the house. I went outside and cautiously lifted the electric box hatch. There was a piece of paper pasted to the metal on the inside of the box. It said: "God bless the people who live in this house."

The hurricanes that season were Bonnie, Charley, Francis, Jeanne and the following year, Wilma, Katrina and others I can't remember now. We got through each and every one. Thanks to the man in the panama hat ... and the man upstairs ... he's still there, they're both there ... haven't you read their messages?

-- From the one-page novel, A Raga for Ragga Island, published by Longhouse, one of the oldest, longest-standing-still-printing alternative presses in America.

Miss Manners and Mr Sloppy

Have you noticed she's not around but he is?

What a pity.

I remember a very proper Jamaican lady telling me not long ago, "We have lost a generation or two."

By which she meant, Miss Manners was on vacation. Anyone who has been on a country bus in Jamaica may have an inkling of what she meant. But what about America?

I would say it's much worse here. Public rest rooms are light years away from when I was growing up.

I'm not talking about small children making mistakes. I'm talking about sloppy men who  know better and don't care. We used to say, Excuse the pigs, the hogs will be along later. But that doesn't work metaphorically. Pigs are actually very clean. Humans are not. 

There was a sign in the main hall of the grammar school I attended in the 1950s and it said -- THMINK. There was another one that showed the picture of a doofus with a goofy grin. He was saying, "Last year I could not evun spell Enjuneer, and now I are one!"

Maybe there's a lot more enjuneers running things.

My mom was a stickler for detail. She instructed me to put the toilet seat down after use. There was a great maternal thing going on in the fifties. Women weren't running things as much as they were informing and shaping them. My mom was anyway.

My mom's gone. But I would still like to think Miss Manners is out there. Or that Mr Sloppy might wake up to the Golden Rule. I saw a sign in the restroom of a local restaurant that gave me some hope. The sign said -- "We aim to please. Will you please aim?"   

From Dreamer To Writer To Award Winner

It always starts with a dream ...

And then with a pencil, pen, marker, chisel, awl, crayon, wet finger on dry wood,
chalk on blackboard ...

It begins some where on some thing ...

Now let's speak about the lovely smiling writer, Frances Bonney Jenner, who was recently awarded a Bronze Medal for Juvenile Fiction by Independent Book Awards and a Silver Medal from the Colorado Independent Book Awards in the Juvenile and Young Adult category.

Let's mention her dream -- to tell the story of a young girl going West in a covered wagon. This was her dream as a writer and she wrote it by hand at first, then by PC, then by hand again, then by PC, and so on and so forth for six years until she had the story down. It's a story you want to read because of the voice of the narrator. And that narrator stands before you holding her book because after much travail -- and, literally, travel on the road her ancestors took to the goldfields of California. Yes, she camped, this author did, on the trail, not once but several times that her family followed in the long ago. And, then, in the writing, she made that long ago seem not so long ago, so that the reader is there, right there in the dust and the sun and the sickness and betrayal and river crossings and hungry longing for home, any home, anything but the trail going West.

For me, as witness to Fran's triumph in prose and verse (the book is made up of both), the book has special meaning. And maybe that can be summed by poet Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead." My father used to say, "If it were easy any damn fool could do it."

Well, now lots of damn fools are out there trying, and I have to admire them for that. No doubt they are all equally good at the dreaming part, the pencil part, the typing at keys part. But as author Andrew Lam (Saving Sight) recently wrote about writing, "It is not a sprint. It is a marathon."

That is why we take our hat off to Fran Jenner. She may be wearing a medal around her neck, but she's still running. There she goes round the bend of the 25th mile. Read her wonderful book, Prairie Journey which is about writing, and life, and a lovely girl named Savannah who learns about these things on the California Trail in 1850.

Who Cast the First Stone in Sanford?

In most human conflicts the question is asked, "Whose rights are being violated?"

I like to go farther back in time, biblically speaking, and ask: "Who cast the first stone?"

In America we have always "enjoyed" the right to bear arms, use force, if necessary, and this goes back to the first stone thrown at the outset of the American Revolution. This happened on the evening of March 5th, 1770 on King's Street in front of the Custom's House in Boston.

That fabled stone, encased in ice, was thrown by a bunch of rabble rousers, as they were called by the King. They were actually patriots who were soon to resist taxation and, amazingly, overthrow the British government that ruled them.

But who got hurt in that first encounter? And who died?

The men who were injured by snowballs, iceballs and rocks were British infantrymen, Lobsterbacks they were called, hirelings of the empire, but nonetheless innocent of any real crime other than guarding a building which they were assigned to watch over.

Who was killed?

One of the first Boston citizens to die in the Custom's House encounter was a man named Crispus Attucks. A black man. The English soldiers got away without serious injury. Attucks became a symbol of colonial rights, and his death was significant. He was a free black who was also part Amerindian. And he was both dead and "dead to rights", the people said. As a martyr no one questioned his pedigree -- who or what he was at birth meant little or nothing to the patriots. He was a fallen soldier in the fight for freedom from tyranny shot dead by two bullets from a British musket.

What really happened?

A revolution happened. After which it became law that a citizen of the U.S., could stand ground, if need be, and protect himself against the threats of the State, the government. Upon this rests the question: Who cast the first stone?

The lobsterbacks? They had the guns. And they were ready to use them. The people with the iceballs? They were ready to use them too. To this day no one knows who cast the first stone in Boston, which, it might be said, was cast in the mind not the gun or the hand. We do know that the lobsterbacks were exonerated. It was none other than John Adams who defended the British soldiers successfully and somehow convinced a jury to acquit his clients.

And it is that way today in Florida.

So who cast the stone in Sanford and who had the gun?  Who is the martyr and who is the murderer? Who is alive and who is dead?