Eight Years

"Eight Years"

By James Robert Smith

I need to say a few things up front, before I even start this story.

My mom was what she liked to call 'half Jewish'. Yeah, I know. Some people say that there’s no such thing. You either are a Jew, or you are a gentile. There is no half-measure to being a Jew. That said, it’s a common term and that’s what she said about herself and that’s good enough for me.

She was proud of that part of her heritage, even if it was mainly denied to her. She was raised around her Jewish aunts, uncles, and cousins and took things in through osmosis and not through being a member of the tribe. Her father had been raised in a very observant home, what some people refer to as an Orthodox Jew. But he lost a great deal of that identity when he married my gentile grandmother and his parents sat shiva on him. (He never saw them again. They were as serious as death on that point.)

Still and all, it was important to my mother and she loved her Jewish relatives and I always felt as if she was a person who really wanted to be Jewish. She seemed to be what I’ve heard some rabbis refer to as “a person with a Jewish soul”.

My dad was a white working class man from the Deep South. Born and raised in Georgia, mainly of Scots-Irish extraction. He was also an atheist since the age of twelve and very early in his life was attracted to left-wing ideology. He came of age around 1930 and rode the rails out of the state and to points north, searching for the impending revolution which, somehow, never came. Because of his brand of politics he befriended many Jews. His favorite writers and political thinkers were all Jews.

Frankly, if I had to venture a guess, I think he ended up in New York City in a search to find a Jewish wife. Instead, he discovered my mom and ended up with a half-Jewish wife. Eh.

So, now, forward many years. It was 1967. The FBI had come down like a ton of Bibles on the nascent American Leftist Revolution and my dad was a bookseller in Atlanta, Georgia. My mom was his business partner and a mother to their eight kids. By then, half of the children were gone, adults. So were almost all of my dad’s leftist thinker Jewish pals. They’d given up on the revolutionary movement and had turned their sights elsewhere—mainly to the State of Israel.

This bugged the shit out of my dad. I mean, it grated on his every last nerve. Why had they all abandoned the struggle so that they could instead focus their thoughts and efforts and donations on a country across the ocean in the Middle East? What kind of an American does that? He stewed.

My dad always enjoyed talking to any of his customers who wanted to discuss politics. Since the store was in a largely Jewish neighborhood, well, he conversed with a lot of Jews. He supported Palestine and those Jewish customers supported Israel. The slow simmer that had been heating at my dad’s passion began to boil.

There were two particular customers—a couple of young Jewish engineering students from Georgia Tech--who enjoyed coming into my dad’s store to bait him. They liked plucking at this old Georgia man who was exceedingly well read, but who didn’t even have a sixth-grade education, having left school before he was ten years old. They would come by to aggravate him and my dad would argue, but he never lost his temper. He just debated with the two assholes who I’d watch as they would team up on my old man and laugh at him.

Then: the Six Days War. The two kids—I saw them a few times and they couldn’t have been more than twenty years old—came in right after this event. They were brimming with confidence and contempt for my dad and decided to drop in on him and rub it in. I’m not sure what they said to him, but he snapped. He didn’t beat them senseless or anything, but they never came to his shop again. That was it. They’d skated a tad too close to the edge and knew well enough to back off.

But it was that moment, I truly feel, that my dad became a Jew-hater.

I’m talking full-bore hatred. As in they all need to go. That kind of hatred. He brought that stuff home.

To that point my parents never argued. Never. In fact, in my admittedly brief eight years of life I had never seen them argue. Not once. But one night after closing the bookshop my dad came in and one thing led to another and he announced that he’d arrived at the logical conclusion that all Jews were inherently evil. All of them. Without exception.

I had been listening to them debate from my bedroom where I had been dozing off for the night. But the debate had turned into an argument. Their voices had risen to yells.

It was raining outside. I recall that vividly and I could hear the rain coming down against my bedroom window as their argument became louder and louder. It was just muffled blasts of voices through the twin barriers of my door and theirs.

And then—BAM!—they were screaming at one another. I had never heard my mom yell that way, her voice filled with complete and unrelenting rage. My dad was, of course, implying that her uncles were evil. That her aunts and cousins were vile. That her father was inherently a monster. And that all of the millions of Jews remaining on Earth that Hitler had not killed were bad news for everyone else. She could not sit there and take that. I then had the impression that something smashed against the floor or against the walls. But it wasn’t like that. It was just my impression of violence between my parents who had never had a cross word in my presence.

In short order, however, I did hear the front door slam. And then silence.

I got up and went out of my bedroom into the hall and entered the dining room where the lights were on. My dad was standing there.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked.

My dad was a big man. Six-foot-two. With a huge beer gut, solid black hair. He looked down at me.

“She went out.”

“But it’s raining,” I said. I had already started crying.

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “She just went out for a walk.”

Who walks in the rain? That made no damned sense whatsoever.

“Why would she do that? Why were you yelling at each other?”

“We were arguing. That’s all. We were just arguing.”

I could think of nothing they could argue about. I knew their store was doing well and that they were making good money. We had nice things and lived in a nice house and they drove a new car and they paid cash for that stuff. I didn’t know any other kids whose parents paid cash for a car, but my parents did. I would tag along when my mom would go in to bargain for a car. It was brutal. Sometimes I would end up feeling sorry for the car salesmen, she drove such a hard bargain.

I was, of course, distressed. Here was my dad standing like an idiot in the dining room doing nothing. My mom was out in the rain walking around. It was very dark. Of course I began to cry even harder.

My dad told me not to cry and that she would come back soon. That she just went for a walk to think. I was worried sick. How could he stand there while my mother was out in the rain? I headed toward the door and he told me not to go out and insisted that she would return very soon. He told me to go back to bed, and I did. Of course I could not sleep. I lay there and waited, listening.

In a while—I don’t know how long, but it seemed like hours--I heard the front door open and I leaped out of bed and ran into the dining room. There was my mom. Soaked to the skin. Her hair—which had been white since before she was thirty—was plastered to her skull. She looked horrible.

“Mama!” I yelled, relieved that she was home. I wanted to hug her but she told me to go back to bed. Again, I did as I was told.

The rest of the night was silent. I don’t think my parents spoke to one another. If they did, it was after I fell asleep. They certainly did not argue.

It was a few days later before I found out what this was all about. My dad hated all Jews? This made no sense to me. My dad hated no one over their race or nationality. How could this be: my father who was for civil rights, human rights; against all racism? Why would he suddenly hate Jews? My mother’s father had been a Jew. This made no sense to me whatsoever and I could only conclude that my dad had gone completely bats.

I’m not sure how they dealt with this development, but my parents never argued about it again. For years it was something that was there, sometimes unspoken, but also bubbling up through a Jew-hating rant from my dad (when my mom was not around).

The years passed. We moved and my parents opened more bookstores as they went elsewhere looking for capitalist wealth. Sometimes they did well, sometimes not so good. Macon. Columbus. Athens. Chattanooga. Finally, Brunswick. It was 1975. I had recently graduated high school. While my mom was disassembling our household to move our furnishings from the mountains of Ellijay to the flatlands of Brunswick, I helped my dad transport his shelves and books from one end of the state to the other. We worked and slept in the store—the building which my parents owned--while we hammered the wood and stocked the shelves. For a while I was my dad’s closest friend and confidant. Nearing the end of his life he had to make do with a 17-year-old son to talk to and to exchange ideas. My mom was several hundred miles away packing the household for the move. His friends were all gone. The bright book buyers whom he counted upon for intellectual inspiration were elsewhere.

As far as I knew—although we never spoke about it much—he still hated Jews. I figured he must, since I’d never heard him renounce it.

One day we were talking. The store had taken shape and was a day or two away from opening. Brunswick was not the kind of town I figured as a successful location for a bookstore. All of the other towns where he’d found profits had been larger population centers. I was worried things would completely fall apart and my parents would end up broke. But through all of this worry on my part we would sit and talk when we weren’t hammering shelves together or alphabetizing books by author.

That day, for some reason, my dad had been talking about Oscar Levant. He really liked that guy. I recall interrupting him.

“Oscar Levant? You like Oscar Levant?”

My dad nodded. “Yes.”

“Wait…he’s Jewish.” Other than the name being a giveaway my mom was obsessed with informing me if a successful person was a Jew. It was her secret way of countering my father’s propaganda, I have always assumed.

My dad shrugged.

“Why would you like him if he’s a Jew?”

“The guy was funny. And smart. And witty. And talented.”

“And a Jew,” I added. “How can you like him if he was a Jew?”

“I just told you why.”

The puzzle of my dad never ceased to confuse me. “You were talking about Edward G. Robinson yesterday. You told me you liked him, too. And I know he was a Jew, also. Why do you like him”

I’ll never forget my dad smiling, then. He didn’t smile a lot. “I figure any guy that ugly who can become a major movie star has to be worth admiring.”

I laughed. “Okay.”

We talked about other things and that was that.

A couple of weeks later, though, the subject came up again. The store was open. It was producing income. We had been eating some lunch in the shop and my dad had begun to tell me of living in New York City when he had met my mom.

“Tell me something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Mama’s father was a Jew. Was he inherently evil, too?” Charles Kurtz, I knew, had been a performer as a young man. In Vaudeville at one time, I was led to understand. He was an acrobat and worked with a partner. But he wasn’t just an acrobat—he was a singing acrobat. They would work their tumbling act and these two muscle-bound Jews would end the performance by singing to the audience. After that, he’d opened a small grocery store that he’d run before dying of cancer while still a relatively young man, leaving behind a wife and seven kids. “How could an acrobat who became a grocer be evil?”

My dad's back stiffened. I’d been sitting behind him on a stool when I had said this. He was in a chair and he half turned toward me, the sandwich in his right hand. “Your mother’s father was a good man. He was very sweet. Don’t ever, ever say anything bad about your grandfather.”

My dad didn’t live a lot longer after that. He neglected his health terribly, having grown up in a time and place where you didn’t go to see a doctor unless you were about to die. And he was about to die, but he didn’t get a chance to see a doctor before it happened. Hearts tend to fail like that, sometimes.

But one day we were there again, in the store, our heads together conversing like two old pals. My dad had been telling me of a book he’d just finished about Charlie Chaplin and some of the good things Chaplin had done in his life.

“I thought you didn’t like Chaplin,” I said. Chaplin apparently would often tell people he was a Jew, even though he wasn’t. Or the public would think it for some reason or another, my dad included.

“I didn’t like him for the past eight years because I thought he was a Jew,” my dad told me. “But he wasn’t a Jew, and I wasted eight years hating him because of that.”

I just stared at him. He sat there stoically looking down the long rows of his bookstore—the last bookstore he would ever own.

“So,  you don't think Jews aren’t evil,” I said.

“No.” The silence of the store around us, the dust, the smell of old pulp. “No, I do not.”

My mom's parents. From what I understand, around this time my grandfather was a performing--apparently a singing!--acrobat. Wish I knew more about that act.

Since our last move this is the only photo of my mom that is not packed away.

Same thing here. Photos of my mom's sisters are all packed up except for these two sent to me via Internet some months ago from a wedding many decades ago (1930s?). Here, my mom's sisters Florris, and Verna.

One of My Favorites

My family and I took two vacations that stand out above all of the others. The best we ever had was our two-week trip to Yellowstone National Park. But our second favorite was a long excursion in our travel trailer down the length of Florida for about an eight-day exploration of the Florida Keys.

And the most fun of any single day was our trip out to the Dry Tortugas National Park many miles off the coast of Key West. The Dry Tortugas NP is one of the least visited of our National Parks. It consists mainly of water and reefs with only a few islands where you can walk around. But the main reason it is so lightly visited is that you can only get there via boat or floatplane. Being working class folk, we chose the less expensive method of getting there by taking a fast catamaran from Key West to Fort Jefferson on the main island.

I didn't really tell Carole and Andy what to expect, only that they would love the trip and that they would see something they'd enjoy immensely. So I stopped at the office and bought three tickets for the catamaran trip out to the Tortugas. As I recall, they ran $70 each, but this included a very nice lunch that was served on the big catamaran.

Carole and Andy thought that they were in for a boring day out to see yet another fort out in the middle of nowhere. Neither of them was very happy as we waited on the waterfront in Key West very early in the morning to board the ship.

But once we got there they were amazed. As with most people, they did not realize that you needn't leave the States to see thriving coral reefs. The main island where one disembarks is surrounded by one of the finest living reef environments in the USA. The ocean is crystal clear and thriving with life. We spent most of the day swimming, snorkeling, and walking around the island (the pre-Civil War fort occupies almost all of the dry land), and bird-watching. When it was time to go they were sad to leave.

Following here are a number of photos I took, most of which I think I have never posted online. This was back in the days before underwater digital cameras. So what I did was stop at a shop where I bought an disposable underwater film camera. Surprisingly, it took fairly good images. Not the best quality, but better than I had expected before I snorkeled out into the ocean, eventually swimming out about 1/3 of a mile before turning back.

I swam through a number of schools of these small fry. It was fun.

This was a section of brick wall that had tumbled off of the fort no telling how long ago. Long since coated in coral accretions.

Another curious fish. Note the coral-covered bricks behind him.

This is the critter that made me turn around and swim back to the island. It's a Nurse shark. I knew at the time it was a Nurse shark and that it was basically harmless, but just the idea of being in the water with fish that big scared me. So I chickened out and went back to Fort Jefferson. This fish was six-feet long, but he was actually afraid of me. I got the impression it was trying to bury its head in that outcropping of coral in an attempt to hide from me.

Andy's Birthday

We had a belated birthday dinner for Andy today. His birthday was on the 19th, but we didn't get a chance to take him to dinner until today.

Now I'm going back to sleep.

Birthday Boy. (Well, he's my birthday boy.)

Andy's vegetarian dinner.

Da Smiff Family. (Except for me. Somebody had to take the photo.)

Things

I generally don't get excited about the things I have bought and the things that I own. I've known folk who get really choked up when they lose or sell something like an automobile that they've had for a while. This rarely  happens with me.

I have a hiking staff that I cut from the 120-acre property that my mom and dad once owned in the mountains of north Georgia. I've had that staff since I was 16 years old. Somehow, I've kept it close over the decades (almost four decades and counting). I have a statue of a bear carved from a piece of cedar that I bought in a shop when I was eight years old on a visit to the mountains of my native state. Again, somehow I've kept it close at hand for 47 years.

But I don't get upset about things like vehicles. However, today we sold our canoe. We've had it for a while. Ten years or more. I can't recall exactly when we bought it, but we've used it to paddle rivers and streams all over the southeastern USA. Everywhere from Tennessee to Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina to Florida. We had a great time using that canoe.

Well, today we sold it to a very sweet couple from Asheville. I think they're going to have as much fun with it as Carole and Andy and I did. After they purchased the canoe, and before they headed back home to Asheville, we drove them over to Mountain Island Lake (five-minute drive) so that they could take the canoe on a test run. Watching them paddle away, I did get a bit of a pang seeing our canoe go angling away from us forever.

The sweet couple who bought our canoe.

Their little boy, Zane.

Goodbye, canoe! I think you're with a great family!

Atlanta Signing, Atlanta Family

Carole and I headed off Friday morning to Atlanta. We had arranged to stay at the home of my niece Michele and her husband Jeff (and their dog, Petunia). Carole and I spent the first part of the day visiting my old neighborhood of Oakhurst and walking around downtown Decatur. But then we headed over to see Michele and Jeff. We also made plans to have dinner so that all of us could link up with Michele's older brother Shane (named after the title character of the film version of SHANE).

I had not seen Michele in decades, and had never met her husband. Michele has grown into a sweet and beautiful woman and her husband Jeff is a very nice fellow. They both work for the Federal government in downtown Atlanta. And for you WALKING DEAD fans, some of the scenes were filmed behind the building where Michele works!

They have a very nice house in Tucker in a neighborhood with many great trees. One thing that I had forgotten about living in the Atlanta area is that it is home to vast numbers of grand old trees. Someone needs to write a book or pamphlet on the groves and individual great trees of the Atlanta area.

Where Michele and Jeff live. Nice big house!

We all link up and head over to The Farmstead in downtown Decatur!

Shane, Jeff, and Michele standing for a quick photo. Well, Shane was squatting down--he's really tall.

My niece Michele, me, Carole, and my nephew Shane.

The Farmstead is in a converted train depot. Very cool place! Good food, too!

And the next day, off to Peerless Book Store to work to make sure I can do this gig long-term. More on that tomorrow.

Killer Diller

My next two novels have a shared character central to both, but the protagonist of neither. His name is, simply, Killer. Because that's what he is--a government assassin. Unlike every other government assassin, this one can see aspects of his own future. Which comes in handy if you're a button man. You know where to be and when to be there. More importantly, you know who to avoid and where not to be when you shouldn't.

Strangely, Killer is also not the villain of either story. He's a strange critter, Killer. He has motives that are neither noble nor pernicious. But his motives are his own, and there is good reason for them. But I'm not telling too much. I hope to sell these two novels, and I'm only 20,000 words into the first one. Probably 80,000 more words to go before I can write "The End" on it.

It's called FAMILY. As the word implies, it'll be fully dysfunctional.

Here's a bit of fiction about Killer, by way of introduction.

Killer Diller

Copyright 2009 by

James Robert Smith

The cell phone went off, an almost silent beep accompanied by a modest vibration. Although he carried the cell with him pretty much everywhere he went, Killer never used it to call out. And only one person had the number. Of course, he’d known the call was coming. He was special that way.

“Hello, Agent Nobody,” Killer said, his voice as cool as the opiates running through his blood made him feel.

“We have something for you to do,” the agent told him. The agent’s voice was not quite so cool as his own, owing to the fact that the gentleman on the other end wasn’t high on heroin. Killer had met the fellow on a few occasions, and he seemed as humorless as a hangman. Which is, really, exactly what he was. The only difference was that the agent didn’t use a rope—he used a cell phone, and someone else pulled the trap door for him—and they knew who that was.

“What is it, this time?” Killer asked. He reached out with a pale left hand and retrieved his coffee cup. It was filled with heavily creamed coffee and lots and lots and lots of raw sugar. Quite often, this was his breakfast of choice. He knew that he should eat something more substantial, but...well...who was going to bother an assassin about what he ate for breakfast?

“I’ll need to see you about this one. It’s a special case.”

“Aren’t they all?” He smiled, although no one was in his house to see him smile and he supposed the agent on the other end could only imagine that he’d smiled. However, he liked to think that his voice had conveyed the image through the ether that connected them across so many miles.

“Well, this one is extra special,” the agent said. And Killer did not need to see the man to know that he was smiling. He knew that the government man did not like him. It was possible that the agent even found his station in life to be distasteful. Killer wasn’t sure about that. After all, he wasn’t a mind reader. All he could do was tell the future.

“I figured as much,” Killer said. “I just had a feeling.”

“I wish you’d volunteer more about these feelings of yours,” the agent said. Then he sighed, and immediately regretted the remark. They’d done all that they could back in the halls of government to figure out what made Killer tick. Everything short of hacking him open to see if there was something inside him that made him able to do what he did. And there had been those agitating to do precisely that. But cooler heads had prevailed. An assassin who could tell what was going to happen before it happened was not something to be wasted like a vivisected rabbit.

Killer, however, did not wish to pursue that old line of conversation, and he was quiet barely long enough to make the agent a little bit uncomfortable. Finally, he spoke. “What time, exactly, will you be coming to see me?”

“As soon as I can,” the agent said. “Just wait for my next call. When it comes, I’ll be very close indeed.” And there was dead air.

Killer closed the little red cell phone and put it in the loose spaces of his front pocket, pausing for just a second to mock the agent. "Close indeed," Killer squeaked. As if his talent would allow him to be surprised by a pisher like the agent. He knew pretty much when the agent would arrive. The threads he’d followed that morning in his first waking minutes had all included the agent. Each of them led him pretty much without incident to a drugstore at the corner of Darling Road and Carole Avenue. Each of them had the pair sitting at the last remaining drugstore lunch counter in that entire side of the state, both of them eating hamburgers and fries and drinking chocolate shakes, the glasses frosted with the cold.

But he didn’t know what the agent was going to say to him, exactly. And he didn’t know where he was going to end up. His talent didn’t work quite that way. Sometimes he had to wait to see what was going to happen and which thread he had to follow and which ones to ignore. And which ones to avoid at all cost, of course. He sighed, took a sip of the wonderful white coffee and wondered why his special ability had not kept him from injecting that first hit of heroin into his arm fifteen years before?

“The world is a mysterious place,” he said to the house, empty but for him.

Family

Sometimes he would visit friends who had families. And he was always amazed and amused and mystified in the love exhibited between these friends and their families. He came from a very large family. His parents had eight kids. Technically speaking, he had five brothers and two sisters. However, of those seven siblings, he only loved two of them—his big sisters. Of his brothers, he had a variance of emotional attachments that tilted from outright hatred to complete neutrality. He just didn’t give a rat’s ass about them, or their wives, or their families (with the exception of some nephews and nieces).

He could go into the whys and wherefores of this situation, but he’d done it so many times in the unbounded dimensions of his own mind that it was almost (but not quite) a tired subject for him. Briefly, he could say that his relationships with his brothers had been based on either abuse or ridicule or disinterest toward him. Some of them he’d like to have seen dead, the others he didn’t really care to see at all. Wasted time, in any event.

And his sisters, the two siblings whom he loved…well, he rarely saw them. The oldest sister was married to an execration; a truly selfish monster whose presence was so distasteful to him that he couldn’t bear to be around him. Therefore, he didn’t have much occasion to see that sister. And the youngest sister, knowing of his distaste and hatred for most of their fellow siblings and their families, found it exceedingly difficult to wedge him in to any visits or leisure time she might have had.

That’s why he found it pleasant and amusing and mysterious to see the family interactions of friends and acquaintances. It was all just so foreign and strange to him.

When he was a kid, and had no choice, he had to endure the company of his brothers. This was almost uniformly a series of very negative and abusive experiences. It was no wonder that his early manhood was spent building up his physical strength so that he walked around as a quite dangerous and powerful ape with a tendency to resort to violence in altercations with males of the species. When he grew up, he continued to endure the company of these brothers out of tradition. He would go to family gatherings and to reunions and profess his love for these folk. Indeed, he was fairly certain that he did love these creatures, out of sheer determination if for no other reason.

At last, though, after some extremely hideous exchanges, some betrayals, the dredging up of some poisonous memories from his childhood, it occurred to him that he was just doing more damage to himself by continuing to mingle with these scumbags. And so, rather later than he should have, he cut off contact between himself and his male siblings. He did encounter a couple of these folk in later years, but out of accident rather than intention. Fortunately for the ones for whom he felt only intense hatred, they had not crossed paths (unless, of course, they saw him first and wisely hid).

For his part, he had his own family: a wife and son and his wife’s mother. Those were the folk for whom he felt the closest connections. These were the people whom he loved the most. There were also his sisters, a couple of nephews, and a couple of nieces, and the children of those nieces and nephews. He loved these people, too, but he rarely saw them and even more rarely shared quality time with them. The holiday seasons that saw vast gatherings at the houses where his parents lived, when all of his brothers and sisters and his parents’ grandchildren would gather--those were only strange memories for him. He would never again see the likes of those, as his tiny family would remain quite small.

And that’s as it should be.

Gee!Thanks!

My parents were certainly not the best. But one thing that I always appreciated about them is that they did not expose me to religion. So that by the time I had to face that stuff at the age of eight, I immediately concluded that it was a pack of lies. And the fact that so many around me accepted these fantasies as reality—Good grief! Give me a break!

In the forty-two years since, I have never wavered.

Thanks, folks!

Priorities.

When I was a younger man, I spent many hours per day writing. Sometimes eight to ten hours sitting at my old electric typewriter. It was fun, and I admit I was obsessed, and that’s how I taught myself to write.

But that obsession came at some cost. I went through periods when I have to admit that my time spent writing stories and novels and articles and scripts caused me to ignore my family. I was so focused on getting the word down on the page that I failed to pay the kind of attention a family requires. It took a while, but I had to admit to myself that I had to back off.

So, after a while, I managed to find a happy equilibrium between my eight-hour workday, my family life, and my time spent writing. My output suffered in quantity, but everyone in my home was happier.

Still, my writing had become not only a kind of second job (perhaps even a first job, with the principle bills-paying employment relegated in my mind as secondary). Before writing had overtaken my leisure time, I’d had a number of hobbies. First among my hobbies had been hiking and backpacking. In my youth I had spent uncounted hours in the outdoors and had hiked many, many hundreds of miles along the trail systems of our parks and wild lands. My writing had put an end to this.

And so, at the age of forty-two, I took stock of the way things were. I’d enjoyed some small success as a writer. In some years, I made as much as $8,000.00 from my writing. Decent, but nothing to get too terribly excited about. I’d managed to sell scripts to major comic book publishers, had gotten into some great anthologies, and had still failed to sell a novel, despite some near misses. For the first time since I was 26 years old, I tried to take an objective look at what I was doing as a writer.

And the first thing that I realized was how much I missed the times I’d spent hiking the high country and backpacking into the South’s wilderness areas. So my wife and I bought camping equipment, and I got a new backpack and all of the equipment necessary to get back into that pastime…and I said goodbye to writing for a while.

For months I barely wrote at all. Instead, I climbed mountains and swam in whitewater streams and looked for big trees in virgin forests and took photographs of bears and looked at rare wildflowers and hiked into gorges and bagged hundreds of peaks and canoed pristine rivers and witnessed a million natural tales. My wife and son and I had a blast.

I didn’t miss writing, because I’d never stopped writing. But I’d placed it where it belonged.

In perspective.

I don’t think that it’s an accident that soon after that I wrote the book that has become my first published novel. And it’s no accident that I come back to my writing after each trip I take with my wife and my son with a new enthusiasm. I’m a better writer than I used to be. My work shows it.

In the darkest lines, I can spy a ray of light.



My son, Andy, and me at Juniper Springs Recreation Area in Florida.