tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84295047461831392322024-03-12T23:44:56.645-07:00Laird Creek ScribblerThe random thoughts and occasional writings of a back-to-the-lander out of the impassioned Sixties, still happy to be here in the mountainous Kootenays of British Columbia after thirty-five years' (and counting) residence.Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-33155888380840540132019-03-08T08:26:00.001-08:002019-03-08T09:16:51.011-08:00News from YelapaThe days fly by here in Yelapa. I blink, and the time between getting up in the morning and going to bed at night is gone. So it goes in this tropical paradise.<br />
<br />
The weather, though, has been mixed until recently, warm and sunny when we first got here at the end of December, the water warm, then cool and overcast and cold water into January, with occasional rain, and through much of February. But March has brought clear skies again, while it remains rather cool for this late in the season.<br />
<br />
What we're experiencing, no doubt, is a little of the wintry weather up north -- along with the planet's climate change in general.<br />
<br />
No complaints, however. The days tick by quite pleasantly enough, and we still have more than a month to go before we leave here. ETD: April 15. We'll go back to BC to see the damage to our house from trees that fell on it during a windstorm in early February. Temporary repairs have been made by friends and family; we'll do the final repairs when we get back.<br />
<br />
Have a nasty cold at the moment. April had it before me. Colds, in fact, have been going around the village all winter and perhaps have something to do with the coolish weather. Still . . . no complaints. <br />
<br />Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-85461231729803626962018-11-30T17:48:00.001-08:002019-03-08T08:33:51.269-08:00Breaking NewsBeen away from here a long time, as usual. Our smoky summer is long gone and winter has started with a couple of snowfalls that have since melted. Temperatures hovering at freezing so far, but real cold is coming, the weather folks say.<br />
<br />
April and I set to leave for our 14th winter stay in Mexico December 29th, my 84th birthday, though she's been hobbling around with rheumatoid arthritis lately. She's had a touch of it for years, but it's gotten especially bad since this spring. Been trying to beat it holistically, but she's ready to try conventional medicine finally.<br />
<br />
Me, I've had a bad back and stiff knees since our encounter with a big Pacific wave on the way in a water taxi to Yelapa two years ago. Both of us suffered spinal compression fractures that day, or have I mentioned this already?<br />
<br />
My novel is out to several publishers (three, or is four, rejections so far), and I think of putting together a couple collections of my stories, probably to be self-published before I quit the game. Perhaps I will have to self-publish my novel too, eventually. So be it. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile, I read every day or evening. Just finished Don DeLillo's<i> Zero K</i>. Before that (my introduction to him) <i>read Mao II. </i>DeLillo's pretty dark and deep, rather difficult but brilliant. He looks at what's happening in the world around him and mulls on it in his fiction. Not for everybody, I guess, but he makes you think. <br />
<br />
Otherwise I'm reading Paulette Jiles, a marvelous writer my wife and I used to know when she lived in our area up here in Canada. She now lives, and writes about, Texas, particularly about mid-19th-century Texas and the conflict between white settlers and Native Americans, notably the Comanche and Kiowa, who raided white settlements and captured those they didn't kill. In <i>The News of the World</i> and <i>The Color of Lightning</i> Jiles manages to be empathetic to both sides, and recreates, in a wonderfully readable style, a lot of what that conflict must have been like. What's especially interesting is her take on the experience of white captives among Native Americans. That many after rescue, particularly those taken as children, preferred to stay with their captives, and suffered from being torn from them, is documented in such books as <i>The Captured</i>, by Scott Zesch, a book I have and have read, as Jiles no doubt has too.<br />
<br />
Check her out online. There's a very good interview with from the <i>Texas Monthly</i>, and her blog, despite her disparagement of it, is always interesting.<br />
<br />
That's all the news from here, as I root for Trump's fall and all his minions and all he stands for in my native country.<br />
<br />
Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-70685359489059051812018-08-07T14:01:00.000-07:002018-08-07T14:01:01.349-07:00Unfinished NovelLooking for a new project this morning, I dug through my files and pulled out the yellowed typescript of the first draft of a novel I started in Mexico almost fifty years ago and never finished.<br />
<br />
Inspired by Mark Twain's <em>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</em> it was to tell, in the first person, the story of a runaway farm boy. I called it <em>The Adventures of Carl Miller. </em>On the upper left corner of the title page is a notation telling me where and when I began the novel: <em>Oaxaca, 12 January 1970</em>. At the bottom of the page is the notation of when I stopped working on it: <em>Halted 13 February 1970</em>. That was because, after producing just short of a hundred pages in a month, I stalled. I stalled after writing a hundred pages of my first two attempts at a novel as well. Eventually, with my memoir, <em>Leaving the Farm</em>, I learned patience, perseverance, and trust. I learned to keep at it until you complete a first draft, a form, however rough and unrealized, you can then begin to cut and expand and shape into a second draft, and a third, into as many drafts as it takes to finally "finish" the thing. Of course it's never finished. Only, if you're lucky, it's accepted by a publisher and you go into a final process with an editor.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I exhumed this old attempt this morning with the idea of maybe taking it up again, of perhaps making of it a novel for juveniles. The writing isn't bad, actually, and I have nothing else on my plate at the moment. What's more, to write a novel of youth, for youths, kind of appeals to this old man.<br />
.<br />
<br />
Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-35046240422357182272018-07-21T15:59:00.001-07:002018-07-25T10:57:24.691-07:00News JunkieVirtually the first thing I do every morning is turn on the TV and click to MSNBC, then CNN, switching back and forth between the two. Then I turn on the radio and listen to <i>Democracy Now!</i> or, since I'm hooked on images, I fire up my computer to watch it online. Finally, having received my morning dose of Trump's latest outrage, the only news worth reporting, it seems, by the US networks these days (<i>Democracy Now! </i>always covers some of what <i>else</i> is happening in the world), I turn at last to my writing.<br />
<br />
Later I'll hear or watch the news on the CBC and maybe the BBC, but as a dual citizen of the US and Canada, and though I've been living in Canada now for more years than I lived in the United States -- and though I definitely feel something of a foreigner in the States now -- in my deepest self, I remain an American. <br />
<br />
I was born in Minneapolis and raised on a family farm in south-central Minnesota, and the lakes and marshes, the woods and fields in that part of the state around the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, (though mostly given now to "hobby" farms, to wooded "estates"), remain the country of my heart. <br />
<br />
Still, I'm no patriot, though I served a hitch in the US Navy in the last half of the 1950s. In the fall of 1970 my wife and I moved to Canada, specifically to the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, as American "refugees," as back-to-the-land dissidents. We became official landed immigrants in June 1971, and Canadian citizens in 1976. Our politics haven't changed. and in fact mine have become more radical. So I'm perhaps a little more interested in the news from south of our border than the average Canadian. In fact, I'm downright obsessed with it.<br />
<br />
My practical wife, on the other hand, finds the TV news too upsetting to watch. She'll switch to the Weather Channel when my back is turned, which is more interesting to her than the news, not to say less depressing. She's a gardener, after all, lives happily in the here and now, and likes to know what she can expect from nature in the next day or so. <br />
<br />
Truth to tell, I'm getting rather tired myself of hearing about Trump to the exclusion of most other news. But he's the outlandish head of the most powerful (though possibly declining) nation in the world, and the dangerous, perhaps demented embodiment of all that's going down in the States right now, and I mean<i> down</i>. Something's gotta give, and that's some hope in what appears to be the worst of times in America's history -- and the world's. <br />
<br />
Let me count the ways. His administration's Mexican border policy: treating Latin American refugees like criminals, separating innocent children from their parents, confining them in internment camps in a criminal return to the treatment of Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians; Canada was complicit) during World War II. Trump's dismissal of climate change, his pulling the US out of the Paris Accord. His and his hand-picked cabinet's intended dismantlement of progressive government programs in the interest of privatization, of profit. His and his ultra-rightwing enablers' apparent dream of a kind of Eden for the super rich, for the winners in this corporate world. Forget the rest of humankind. They're life's losers. <br />
<br />
There's a lot of outrage now, a lot of protest, a lot of recognition of what's happening. Therein lies some hope, I tell myself.<br />
<br />Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-64533148771272911642018-04-25T09:30:00.001-07:002018-07-22T13:30:24.041-07:00The View From 100<br />
My father-in-law, George Luchtan, will be a hundred years old tomorrow. My wife and I have been looking after him this past month in Detroit, and I've wondered what it must be like for him at his very advanced old age.<br />
<br />
I think of a book by the literary historian Malcolm Cowley, written when he was in his 80s, called <i>The View From 80</i>. In it Cowley quoted a fellow octogenarian as saying, "I feel like a young man who has something the matter with him." I'm 83 myself now, and can relate. My father-in-law, on the other hand, at age 100, has a lot the matter with him, and I doubt he feels like a young man anymore.<br />
<br />
Still, he's amazingly alert, though physically and
mentally, of course, not the man he once was. He was a fixer, a
problem solver, as a young radio repairman in Yakima, Washington, and later as a
Ford general foreman in the company's River Rouge plant in metropolitan
Detroit. But he isn't able to fix much anymore.<br />
<br />
Yet he still reads, mostly technical stuff, stuff he's read before and now comes to as if for the first time. Watches closed-captioned television (factory work damaged his hearing early on, and he's all but deaf now). Still likes the challenge of puzzles, but he seldom figures them out anymore, even those he invented.<br />
<br />
He lives now one day at a time, as don't we all, really. When you ask him how he is in the morning, he replies, I'm alive." <br />
<br />
Sleep, I think, is his great pleasure now. He's asleep more than he's awake these days, having dreams (sometimes what he calls nightmares). He sometimes talks in his sleep. He sometimes confuses a particularly vivid dream with reality.<br />
<br />
And he doesn't get around much anymore. Except for trips to see his doctor, or whenever we can get out to a restaurant meal, he's confined to the house. Doesn't get much exercise other than the walk from his bedroom to his chair in front of the television, or into a back room where he sits and watches the birds in his back yard. We throw bird seed on the ground to attract the birds.<br />
<br />
So how much "quality" does my father-in-law have left in his life? Enough, it seems. He soldiers on. Still sings snatches of old songs, recites poems he memorized as a young man and still remembers. Still notices things, still laughs at some of them. Tells stories out his past, stories of personal triumphs, of problems solved.<br />
<br />
He's looked forward to his 100th birthday. There'll be some 20 well-wishers in his house tomorrow, relatives mostly, some old friends who happen still to be alive. It'll be an exciting, tiring day for him, and he'll perhaps be unable to sleep tomorrow night and instead sleep all the next day.<br />
<br />
What's next for him, besides the inevitable? We all hope it'll be a return to his house in the Florida Keys, which was severely damaged by Hurricane Irma last September, from which he and his youngest daughter Kathleen, his chief caregiver, had to evacuate, and where she's been this month seeing to the repair of the place. There on Long Key he can sit out on his veranda above a canal, in Florida's warm sun, and watch the birds and the boats going by. Long may he still live. Happy Birthday, George. <br />
<br />
<em>Postscript, May 15, 2018.</em> George Luchtan, my father-in-law, passed away today, just two weeks after his 100th birthday. After achieving his goal of reaching 100, he seemed to let go. The evidence is he had a "small" heart attack either just before or just after his birthday; his heart, near the end, was barely functioning. He died at home, in a room from which he could watch the birds in his back yard feeding on the seed his youngest daughter threw on the ground to attract them. Before he lapsed into his final sleep, he said, "I didn't know it would take this long to die." He had a good long life. Rest in peace, George, as I add this picture of you with your daughter, April, my wife of 53 years, on your birthday.<br />
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Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-75857833017843006212018-04-15T13:44:00.000-07:002018-04-15T13:46:19.665-07:00Waiting for SpringWe're in Detroit, looking after my wife's aged father (soon to turn 100) and waiting for spring. Today is dark and rainy here. Earlier the rain was creating icicles. The weather is crazy, everywhere on the planet, and the evidence is of climate change caused by global warming (that the arctic is warming is most alarming). Yet there are people -- self-serving most of them -- who are climate change deniers.<br />
<br />
These are crazy times, and knowing that history itself is more or less a record of crazy times holds little comfort. Still, we beat on, though this planet, our one and only home in the universe, seems sick and we've doubtless had something, probably a lot, to do with it.<br />
<br />
We flew here on Easter Sunday from Puerto Vallarta, leaving warm weather and our winter home in Yelapa behind (actually, it had just started to warm up around the Bay of Banderas after an abnormally cool season) but expecting to enjoy, as April unfolded, the start of spring in Detroit. Instead, we've been suffering an extended winter.<br />
<br />
It's still cold and snowy in southeast British Columbia, where we live, and yesterday there was a "spring" blizzard blowing around Minneapolis, where my sister lives.<br />
<br />
We fly for home on the 27th of this month, the day after my father-in-law's birthday. Maybe<i> </i>it'll be spring by then. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-79130035211721110952018-03-25T15:42:00.000-07:002018-03-25T15:44:09.243-07:00Semana Santa in YelapaIt's Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week here. It's also the start
of our last week in Yelapa this year. I say "this year" because our
hope, our intention, is always to return next year. God willing. If
we should live so long. <br />
<br />
I'm sitting at my laptop on the front
balcony of Casa Emilio at the start of another beautiful day here. I'm
surrounded by jungle. Below, mostly obscured by the trees, is the
central village, and beyond, across Yelapa's cove, is the main beach.
There's a spinytail iguana -- the locals call them garobos -- in a tree
in front of me. We have a resident population of these black lizards,
some of which, the males, I think, sport streaks of scarlet on their bodies.
They live under our roof tiles, come down the steep little stairway
from the flat rooftop above our guest room (where we sunbathe, hang
our wash to dry) to waddle past me at my computer, cross the balcony,
slip between the wooden bars of the railing, and crawl out into the sun
on our landlord's tiled roof to warm their cold reptilian blood before
hopping into a tree to eat some leaves. They grow quite tame as they
get used to us each year, often stopping within a foot or so of <i>your</i> foot to
look up and cock their heads as if waiting for you to say something. I
often do say something, like "How you doin', buddy?" or "Aren't you looking ugly today?"<br />
<br />
Actually, they're kind of cute, and lately they've been chasing each other around in a reptilian mating dance.<br />
<br />
We
have other visitors on occasion. One night I was awakened by what sounded like
crockery being moved around on the front balcony outside our bedroom.
Got up, shined my light through the bars of our open window, heard a
scurrying. Cranked open the door to the balcony and pointed my light
across the balcony to see the back end of a raccoon and the face of
another, its eyes reflecting my light back to me from between the bars
of the railing. I had to charge out at it to get it to scramble across
the roof tiles and jump into a tree.<br />
<br />
Then just
yesterday my wife April, while sweeping our bedroom floor, pulled our
empty luggage bags away from the wall, where they'd been stored since
January, and there was the curled-up length of a snake. She yelled.
Norma, our landlady, at her lavadero just below us, came up, grabbed our
broom and clapped it down on the snake as it tried to crawl away. I
came down from our front balcony, Norma handed me the broom, and I
managed to sweep the snake outside of the bedroom, onto our back
(kitchen) balcony, and down the stone steps of our entrance.<br />
<br />
This
was the second snake we've had to eject from our house, the first found
in our bathroom about three weeks ago. That one I prodded from where it
was curled behind the toilet into the shower stall, where it escaped
through one of the two holes in the concrete wall where the water pipes
come through. Both were long and skinny, dark and speckled. We have a
field guide to the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals of western
Mexico, but I'm not sure it shows the kind of snake we've seen. Norma
calls them house snakes, which tells us something. In any case, they're
harmless, she says, and they're probably good for ridding the house of other creepy-crawlies.<br />
<br />
Oops! My wife says I must stop now. She wants us to
go down to the village for the Palm Sunday procession. The church bell
has been tolling.<br />
<br />
P.S. We missed it. Took too long writing this post. Next year!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-15748715871416086962018-02-10T10:55:00.000-08:002018-02-10T10:55:18.521-08:00Old Guy Writes First NovelOdd weather here on the Bay of Banderas lately, overcast, misty, even a little rainy accompanied by lightening and thunder. But definitely warmer than it was when we arrived in Yelapa at the end of December. Then we had cool days and downright chilly nights through much of January. We feel the humidity now, if not always see the sun. The leaves are falling. Spring is coming.<br />
<br />
Sent off a revised and largely rewritten draft of my novel to the editor I've hired for a professional critique. I've actually had two editors look at it, and both more or less liked what I'd done on my own while offering much-needed and much-appreciated suggestions. Dammit, I'm determined to find a trade publisher for the thing but, at last resort, will publish it myself just to be done with it.<br />
<br />
I call it <i>Waiting for the Revolution</i>. It's set at the beginning of the 1970s in a back-to-the-land commune in British Columbia. The characters are mostly American "refugees" of the period. The title, apart from the idea of a cultural and political revolution, I hope suggests the longing for some all-inclusive change for the better, something like a "final solution" to the human condition. In that sense, the title can be taken as ironic. <br />
<br />
It's basically a love story, a story of relationships, my main characters a man and wife who break up, tentatively rejoin in the free-love atmosphere of a sixties-era commune, and finally struggle to make it together as a couple. The struggle won't end, I want the reader to infer. Life itself is a struggle. The human condition goes on.<br />
<br />
Gees, I see the last two paragraphs above as something like the dust jacket copy for my novel. Should I wind up self-publishing, I might use it. Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-79403797385712977562018-01-28T15:59:00.000-08:002018-01-28T15:59:06.477-08:0028 January 2018Here we are, my wife April and I, back in Yelapa for our 13th stay in this village just down the coast from Puerto Vallarta. Arrived here at the end of December, the day after my 83rd birthday, and plan to remain until around the 20th of April when we'll go to Detroit for April's father's 100th birthday before returning to our home outside Nelson, BC.<br />
<br />
I doubt very much I'll make it to my father-in-law's very advanced age; not sure I even want to, though his abiding alertness is amazing. He sleeps a lot, his short-term memory grows ever shorter, but he's still reading, still thinking, still acquiring knowledge, still content to be alive.<br />
<br />
I recently read an interview with Philip Roth, who in his mid-80s claims to have retired from writing. He hasn't, of course, retired from reading, nor from thinking, and what he says about his old age and the approach of the inevitable that awaits us all certainly resonates with me. He goes to bed at night, he says, grateful to have had the day, and wakes up the next morning thankful to be starting another. That's basically it for us folks who have made it beyond the biblical three score and ten.<br />
<br />
Unlike Roth, I'm still writing in my mid-80s, though also unlike him I have virtually nothing to show for all the years I've been writing -- some 60 years, starting in 1956 when as a Navy sailor I started sending out stories and within a couple of years actually published a few in obscure and now vanished magazines.<br />
<br />
How time has gotten away from me. How much time I've wasted in my long life. Still . . .<br />
<br />
Hope springs eternal.Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-7523374045480778302014-08-26T13:53:00.000-07:002014-08-26T13:53:45.430-07:00It's been over a year since I posted here, don't know what I want to say, but I guess I'll just ramble on for whatever it's worth.<br />
<br />
I turn 80 at the end of this year. Hard to believe -- until I think back to all the years I've been alive in this world, all the lives I've lived, all the jobs I've had, farm boy, college student, Navy journalist, university student on the GI Bill, then newspaper reporter, magazine editor, high school janitor, urban mail carrier, golf course groundskeeper, back-to-the-lander, husband, father, grandfather. And writer, always a writer, beginning when I was still in high school and never stopping, though only on a part-time basis, through most of the years of my working life (until I was able to retire in 1998. Sixteen years ago! Since then I've been writing full time -- that is two to four hours every day except when interrupted (my wife and I hike with a group one day each week, sometimes take a trip, and occasionally I have to stop writing to do some housework or work in the garden or chop and stack firewood). <br />
<br />
So what have I got to show for all my years as a writer, would-be and otherwise? Not much: a lot of unpublished and some published short stories, quite a few published book and movie reviews (in the 1980s and '90s), a memoir I took years to write and was finally published in 2007 (mentioned a number of times in this blog), and a novel I took years to write and for which I'm now looking, without much hope, for a publisher. <br />
<br />
I may have to publish it myself, finally.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-89170408117512490152013-04-04T17:51:00.000-07:002013-04-04T17:51:17.495-07:00Yelapa countdownWe leave this tropical paradise just a week from today, just when it's turned most paradisal. That is, we wake each morning now to the cool start of another hot day (to take from a favorite description from a favorite writer of mine: you may guess who) after sleeping with only a sheet to cover us and our bedroom's overhead fan going at a steady clip. In the cool of the morning we might take a walk, before or after breakfast, and in the hot afternoon enjoy a swim at Isabel's beach. The Pacific water in the Bay of Banderas is finally warm enough, as it wasn't (for me, anyway) through most of January, February, and quite a bit of March.<br />
<br />
In the cool of the evening we might take a second walk, if only to go down to the village to visit one of Yelapa's three main tiendas for some groceries. Otherwise we might go out for our evening meal, our <i>cena</i>, at one of village's outside or semi-outside restaurants, El Pollo Bollo or Tacos y Mas or Los Abuelos. Or we might walk the short distance upriver to the Oasis to see a Tuesday or Wednesday night movie. Or stop by Gloria's or El Cerito to hear some good blues or rock and roll by Yelapa's resident musicians. Or walk the longer distance upriver and across the bridge over the Rio Tuito to eat at El Manguito or order only a beer in order to listen to the good music you often can hear there.<br />
<br />
Then home by flashlight, down the upriver path to the village, through the village and finally up the rocky trail, feeling the tiredness by this time in our legs (one acquires "Yelapa legs" here) to our rented apartment above our landlords' house in the jungle.<br />
<br />
Of course we have only a week left to squeeze all this in -- so I doubt we'll even try. We are, though, going tomorrow up to Chacala, the mountain village above Yelapa from which its founding families came from many years ago. Though Yelapa has no road, per se, to it, and is mainly reached by panga, water taxi, from Puerto Vallarta, there is a dirt road, more a bulldozed track that has to be repaired every year after the rainy season, that starts outside El Tuito, a town on the highway some thousands of feet above Vallarta, angles more or less level to Chacala, then plunges down toward Yelapa to end on the ridge above the village. Our landlords' son, Emi, keeps a truck up there, in an area called "the parking lot," and tomorrow morning we'll walk up with him and his mother, Norma, and perhaps his younger brother, Omar, for the drive up to Chacala, to spend the day.<br />
<br />
Among other pleasures, we'll visit Emi's beautiful younger sister, Nora, who's married now and has a child. <br />
Our landlord, Emilio, will remain in Yelapa tomorrow to work at his trade. He's a builder in the village.<br />
<br />
"Our family," we call our landlords and their children, whom we've gotten to know and care for after eight winters with them.<br />
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We'll be among the last of Yelapa's <i>norteamericanos</i> to leave this year. <i>Hasta ano proximo</i> is what you say to people, gringos and Mexicans alike, as you leave: See you next year.<br />
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We hope. At our age it's one year at a time. <br />
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<br />Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-17540040185253733932013-03-22T17:05:00.002-07:002013-03-22T17:20:04.479-07:00Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico. Our eighth winter here, and it's almost over. Today, which began cool and overcast, turned sunny and hot, and is now cool and overcast again, finds us with only three weeks left here. We came down for three months and our stay has now dwindled to three weeks. Soon, as time flies, we'll be looking at only three days left before our departure.<br />
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So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, were he still alive. I'm reading a good biography of Vonnegut by Charles J Shields, one his subject might not have approved of, given that we're shown the author who was a 1960s icon and the idol of the hippie generation, warts and all. Like most writers, Vonnegut's writing showed his best side. Some of the people who knew him saw his worst.<br />
<br />
And so it goes . . . which happens to be the title of Shields's biography. <br />
Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-84057107182775459602012-09-17T14:22:00.001-07:002012-09-17T14:22:28.311-07:00Enjoying a lovely fall day here as I reenter this blog after a long absence. Since last writing have completed my back-to-the-land novel begun some four years ago (its sixth draft, anyhow) and am starting to look for an agent or publisher. Don't hold out much hope for an agent. As for finding a publisher? There I have a some little hope, though I gather it's getting harder and harder for even published writers, well known as well as obscure (yours truly among the latter), to locate one these days, even among the smaller houses. Self-publishing, though becoming more prevalent and no longer lumped as "vanity," isn't an option for me. Not yet. Don't have the money, for one thing.<br />
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I was, since my last posting, shortlisted for the 2011 Journey Prize (one of several given by the Writers' Trust of Canada), for a story published the year before in <i>The New Orphic Review</i>, a Canadian literary magazine. That won me an all-expense-paid trip to Toronto for the awards ceremony (it was a little like Oscar night in Hollywood, without the glitz) and $1,000. The big prize of $10,000 eluded me, but I'm not complaining. Being one of three finalists for the prize was an encouragement, along with my story being included in the 2011 <i>Journey Prize</i> anthology.<br />
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I'm sort of working now on putting together a collection of my stories and continuing to fuss with the text of my novel. I intend to write more stories and possibly start working on another book-length project while in Mexico this winter.<br />
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I turn 78 at the end of this year. That serves as a goad.<br />
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Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com106tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-70843975816561154112011-04-26T18:12:00.000-07:002011-04-27T13:05:18.946-07:00Henry Miller's Tropic of CancerAs a young, would-be writer back in the early 1960s, I read quite a bit of the once notorious Henry Miller -- his book on Greece, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Colossus of Maroussi</span>; his study of Rimbaud, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Time of the Assassins</span>; his essays in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wisdom of the Heart</span>; his book on America, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Air-Conditioned Nightmare</span>; the collection of letters between him and Lawrence Durrell -- but his first book, the infamous <span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic of Cancer,</span> first published in France in 1934 and, until 1961, banned from publication in the U.S., I'd somehow missed until this past winter in Mexico.<br /><br />This despite that my copy of the book, a paperback edition of the original Grove Press hardback, was purchased in 1962, the year the paperback came out in the States.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic of Cancer</span> is a kind of memoir in the form of a kind of novel, I've now discovered -- an anarchist's rant, a cry of despair, a shout of rage and crazy hope. It's racist (particularly anti-Semitic), misogynist, profane, crudely sexual, provocative. It's deliberately raw in parts, lyrical in others. It's also funny, and contains whole swaths of brilliant, sometimes surreal, even profound writing. I'm reminded of a later writer's all-out, last-ditch expression of himself, Frederick Exley's <span style="font-style: italic;">A Fan's Notes</span>, published in 1968. Exley, despite his acute alcoholism, managed to write two more fictionalized memoirs before he died, early, of alcoholism. But with <span style="font-style: italic;">Notes</span> he'd shot his wad. Miller, on the other hand, went on to write many more books, mostly of reminiscence, and was famous, rather than infamous, by the 1960s as a voice of free expression, sexual and otherwise. <span style="font-style: italic;">Playboy</span> took him up! He lived to be 89, a kind of sage, before his death in 1980.<br /><br />One wonders now why <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>his first book was banned for so long as too sexually explicit. The sex in it is the least of its content. <br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span></span></span>Here is Miller stating his case at the beginning of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic of Cancer</span>, after three warm-up paragraphs:<br /><br />"It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.<br /><br />"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I <span style="font-style: italic;">am</span>. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.<br /><br />"This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing . . . "Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-65499065724970296942010-08-06T20:32:00.000-07:002010-08-07T10:23:15.119-07:00Well, it's been a while since my last post. I've been just off stage all along, however, too busy working on a novel, currently in its fourth draft, that I hope eventually to hew into some semblance of shape and substance. And then there has been helping my wife plant and then tend our garden, weekly jaunts into the mountains with members of our hiking club, nighttime reading and/or movie watching while helplessly, hopelessly becoming a political junkie via the Internet and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Democracy Now!</span>. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I get a dose of concern or outrage every weekday morning by listening to <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Democracy Now!</span> over Kootenay Co-op Radio while sometimes having to choke down my breakfast.<br /><br />But heck, life is still good, still worth the struggle. At age 75, I still have my faculties and reasonable physical health. I have a loved and loving wife and family, and live in one of the beautiful places in the world. There's a Spanish saying that Malcolm Lowry put in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Under the Volcano</span>, his great novel set in Mexico, and that I've taken to heart: <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">No se puede vivir sin amar</span>. One cannot live without loving (or without love, as some translate it). Yes. I recite that to myself almost every day. And live on in the teeth of climate change, perpetual war, and political, economic, and environmental disaster. What can you tell us about life? William Faulkner was asked after he'd emerged from obscurity by winning the Nobel Prize for literature.<br /><br />"It goes on," he said.Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-15779466809435266472009-12-02T11:22:00.000-08:002009-12-03T11:35:11.945-08:00DistractionsI can't be the only writer (permit me to call myself one, though I'm an obscure, one-book author hopefully working on a second) who finds himself inordinately distracted these days by the sorry state of the world and the inept, not to say criminal, way it's being run.<br /><br />Every morning I wake with a fresh resolve to eat a quick breakfast and then start writing. Instead I can't abstain from listening to <span style="font-style: italic;">Democracy Now!</span> over my oatmeal and coffee for its reports of this or that national or international outrage. Afterwards, fed and suitably inflamed, I go to my computer, not immediately to resume working on the second draft of my novel, but first to check my email. Then, helplessly, I go into <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nation</span> and various other vehicles of the Left, the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times, </span>the <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span>, and the <span style="font-style: italic;">Los Angeles Times</span> for <span style="font-style: italic;">their</span> takes on the news, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Globe & Mail</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Guardian</span>, and maybe a blog or two of the Left and sometimes of the Right. I even, now and then, check out Fox News for <span style="font-style: italic;">its</span> poisonous slant on things. Usually, though, I save that entertainment for later.<br /><br />Eventually I get to my writing.<br /><br />What I'm writing now, as mentioned in the previous post, is a novel about back-to-the-land hippies (mostly Americans) in Canada, circa 1971, and so perhaps my procrastination every morning to catch up on the world's (notably the United States' and Canada's) bad news isn't entirely a waste of time. The Sixties, to borrow once again from Dickens, were both the best and the worst of times. These times seem only the worst. In the 1960s we in the counterculture lived, as some acknowledged, off the fat of the land. Now, at the start of the 21st century, most of the fat's been rendered except for the obscenely rich one percent.<br /><br />In the Sixties we more or less played at making a revolution. We can't play at it anymore. We have to work for it. In any case, change is coming, whether we work for it or not, and whether we like it or not. You don't have to read James Howard Kunstler or Jeff Rubin to get an inkling of that.<br /><br />Now back to my novel.Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-34420528336806785852009-07-20T18:16:00.000-07:002009-07-20T20:12:45.071-07:00Step One in the Writing of a NovelTwo days ago I completed the first draft of a novel I made notes and an outline for ten years ago and have worked on, sporadically and for the last year exclusively, ever since.<br /><br />It's a kind of love story I'm calling <span style="font-style: italic;">Waiting for the Revolution </span>that starts in Mexico at the end of the 1960s but is mainly played out in a back-to-the-land hippie commune in British Columbia.<br /><br />I started it in 1998, shortly after completing the first draft of my memoir, <span style="font-style: italic;">Leaving the Farm</span>, only to abandon it after thirty pages to concentrate on subsequent drafts of the memoir. Resumed work on the novel in December 2000 and completed six chapters of it before again abandoning it. Picked it up again in August 2005, after sending out the thirteenth draft of <span style="font-style: italic;">Leaving</span> to Oolichan Books, and worked on it until my wife and I left for Mexico in January 2006. Laid it aside at the end of that month to work on yet another draft, the fourteenth and final one, of the memoir, which was accepted by Oolichan in June 2006.<br /><br />I gave the rest of that year to the editing process. Returned to Mexico in January 2007 and made little progress on the novel, chiefly working at revising what I'd already written while waiting, with some eagerness, for the publication of my memoir, which happened right after we got home from Mexico at the end of March 2007.<br /><br />The rest of <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> year was given to the book launch, to subsequent readings, to my little "tour" in Minnesota, and other promotions of the book.<br /><br />Got back to the novel the winter of 2007-08 in Mexico, again mostly revising what I'd written before, but from July of 2008 until this past Saturday -- exactly a year -- I wrote nearly every day on the book to complete this first draft.<br /><br />Length: 287 printout pages. Count: 74,390 words. I see a final draft of no more than 75,000 words.<br /><br />So now I'll let this draft sit for awhile and work on something else. Then try to read "objectively" what I've written before going at the second draft wth the hope of finishing it by the end of this year or, at the outside, by the end of another winter in Mexico.<br /><br />I won't approach any publishers until I've <span style="font-style: italic;">completed</span> a second draft, and maybe not then if what I've written still seems too rough or unrealized.<br /><br />Like any other writer with a first draft, established or otherwise, I'll have my work cut out for me. First, I'll have to see what I've got so far, if anything, to work <span style="font-style: italic;">with</span>. Then there'll be stuff to cut, stuff to expand upon, characters to flesh out, characters, perhaps, to drop or to introduce. A first draft is just a lump, after all, waiting to be hewn into some form; a negative not yet developed; a slapped-together frame one might have to tear apart and start over; at best a hazy picture in need of focusing. <br /><br />A confusion right now, a mess. Oh yeah, I've got some work ahead of me. The first draft is only the first step, a crude suggestion, after all, of what might -- that is, <span style="font-style: italic;">might</span> -- become a finished thing.<br /><br />Have I mentioned my excitement?Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-81661852656723199332009-06-28T12:39:00.000-07:002009-06-28T15:49:25.922-07:00A Morning in YelapaFor what it's worth (if anything), here is a video taken one morning last winter in Yelapa as April was preparing our breakfast and we were surrounded by the raucous calls of chachalacas, a pheasant-like tropical and sub-tropical bird that lives almost entirely in the trees. In Yelapa they compete every morning with the crowing of roosters in the village.<br /><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzGSa7ruJGbdwnB0W3ILRPnZoMrvVJjuseVlvZrU6VOzNK0K8WR47V-yeIfF2l9m-htt1dM3GpYNgcRVmcsqA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-10275327720791545342009-06-26T17:49:00.000-07:002009-06-28T12:29:40.045-07:00Back to the LandMy wife April and I came to Canada as Back-to-the-Landers at the end of the Sixties. Recently we were asked to reminisce about those thrilling days of yesteryear almost forty years ago, and I'm now moved to offer the following little piece, written initially for a reading in Nelson and later published online in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tyee</span> as "Note from an American Refugee." I should note here, as I did for <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tyee</span>, that I was not a draft dodger at the time, having served in the U.S. Navy <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> Vietnam, but was certainly against the war and a supporter of those resisting it. This is the original (revised) version of the piece:<br /><br /> BACK TO THE LAND<br /><br />November 13, 1970. Friday the 13th. We arrive in British Columbia after a three-day drive from my native Minnesota.<br /><br />The first day we’d traveled northwest from Hamel, Minn., to Minot, N.D. The next day we drove straight north to the border, reached the Trans-Canada Highway, and drove west across the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Medicine Hat, Alta. The third day we drove through the Rockies and down the valley of the Kootenay River, then over the Salmo-Creston Skyway and, after dark, along that empty stretch between Salmo and Nelson wondering where in the boondocks we were getting to. Finally, about 9:30 in the evening, after the 25-mile drive up the West Arm of Kootenay Lake to Queens Bay (and noting with some relief the pleasant-looking cottages along the lake, reminding us of the shore of Lake Minnetonka, near where I grew up), we found the rented house in which we would live communally with April's sister and her husband and her two children by a previous marriage, and which, by the following summer, would include, in and around it, some ten of us Back-to-the-Land expatriates.<br /><br />At the little border station on the cold prairie north of Minot, the Canadian guard had peered into our '64 Ford piled high with virtually everything we owned — including April's sewing machine on the back seat; the trunk was weighed down to the car's axles with my books — and said with the suggestion of a wink, "Just visiting, eh? Well, you're entitled to look around, but if you decide to settle, I'd advise you to see Immigration." And waved us through.<br /><br />We felt like refugees from eastern Europe after having passed successfully through the Iron Curtain.<br /><br />It was the worst of times; it was the best of times (to borrow from the start of Dickens’ <span style="font-style: italic;">A Tale of Two Cities</span>). There'd been the Kennedy assassinations — both of them; the Detroit race riot of 1967 (I was a Detroit mail carrier that summer, walking streets strewn with broken glass and discarded loot to deliver to addresses that no longer existed because they’d turned to rubble overnight, while gangs of young blacks went by in cars with police cars following them, shotguns sticking out of the windows, and Army trucks carrying National Guardsmen trundled by, and police helicopters hovered overhead); Martin Luther King's assassination; the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention; the much-protested Vietnam War . . . this in the face of self-indulgent prosperity.<br /><br />As we crossed the border, we were only dimly aware of Canada's own brush with the tumultuous times — it had been in the news just a couple of weeks before: the October Crisis. What was that? Something about Quebec, a late battle in the war between the French and English that was supposed to have ended in 1763, just as the American Civil War, a hundred years later, was supposed to have settled the differences between the North and the South, between blacks and whites.<br /><br />Certainly it was, or had been, the worst of times for my wife and me after breaking up in Mexico the winter before and since then struggling to reconcile our differences. This trip to B.C., this escape from our troubled past and the troubled U.S., this final remove from "the city" (though we'd lived the last two years in the country, outside Minneapolis, on my parents' golf course — once part of our family farm), was, besides a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, our enlistment in a movement. Somewhere in the boxes of books we'd hauled with us to British Columbia was a copy of Helen and Scott Nearing's <span style="font-style: italic;">Living the Good Life</span>. It would be our bible.<br /><br />A week or so after our arrival in Nelson, I was reporting my first impressions to friends back in Minneapolis: <br /><br />Here we are homesteading in the Kootenays of British Columbia.<br /><br />We're living in an old farmhouse with April's sister and her husband, on a slope above Kootenay Lake, 90 miles long and two to three miles wide, like a Norwegian fiord with its mountainous shores and the play of light and cloud on the forested, frosted slopes. With the house are a couple of outbuildings, shacks, and a little orchard of apple trees.<br /><br />My first job on arriving here was to help Al trim the apple trees, then drag the branches to the garden where we burned them for fertilizer. Worked one day for an old lady up the road and got paid for it. Cut wood with a chainsaw and threw the furnace-sized chunks into the basement. Dug up the septic tank and drainage tile, bucketing out the former and spreading it in the garden, lifting out the latter and re-laying it. A good job done, as the mess in the septic tank was like a great biscuit ready to take out of the oven. We put yeast in the tank after emptying it, so in about ten years (hopefully no sooner) there'll be another biscuit all nicely formed for us. Got the tank and tile work done just prior to the freeze-up.<br /><br />Our life here is generally comfortable, if at a subsistence level. We exist, right now, almost entirely on the $300 a month Dianne receives for child support. Al, who has a definite talent for organization and a good bargain, sees that we buy in bulk: five-gallon drums of peanut butter, for instance, cans of honey, sacks of brown rice and powdered milk. Of necessity we're vegetarian — except for the odd windfall: last week someone brought us a side of venison; he'd chanced on the animal, still warm, a roadkill. I wish I'd brought my shotgun for grouse.<br /><br />This is country where Vikings, you imagine, could come rowing out of the mist on the lake, or Valkeries ride down out of the dramatically clouded sky to fetch some hero to Valhalla. It’s a landscape, in short, out of the Romantic School of painting, the light streaming down on the mountains like God's grace in a holy picture.<br /><br />I think I like it here.Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-81729514514317246302009-06-04T15:22:00.000-07:002009-06-14T17:07:00.845-07:00Those Great Old Classic ComicsWho, among those of my generation, didn’t read, and thoroughly enjoy, comic books when they were a kid? And who, particularly those who otherwise read books, didn’t read, and thoroughly enjoy, Classic Comics (later called Classics Illustrated)?<br /><br />I went to Google recently and was happy to find, in Wikipedia, a listing of all the Classic Comics and Classics Illustrated titles ever published. The series ran, according to Wikie, from 1941 to 1971. Since then there have been revivals of the series, I gather, in North America and England, but the original, the “classic,” series will remain, for old nostalgia buffs like me, the one worth remembering.<br /><br />My introduction to the series, unless memory fails, came on Christmas Eve of 1942. I was five days away from my eighth birthday, living with my parents and my two younger sisters on our dairy farm in Minnesota, and because of regular chores on Christmas Day morning and mass at the nearest Catholic church afterwards, the folks had arranged for Santa Claus to visit early on Christmas Eve, early enough for us kids to receive and open our presents from the old elf — and from the folks — before bedtime.<br /><br />I forget what Santa brought me that year, but I remember vividly the boxed set given to me by my parents of the first four numbers of Classic Comics. They were: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Last of the Mohicans, and I read them all, one after the other, sitting hunched before the heat register in the dining room of our old farmhouse (the heat coming up from the coal furnace in the cellar) far into the night, long after the folks and my sisters had gone to bed. That I’d been allowed to stay up, I suppose says something about my parents’ leniency or neglect. Anyway, I was perfectly absorbed, that long-ago night, till about 2 a.m.<br /><br />After that, I started collecting Classic Comics, and eventually Classics Illustrated, until I had piles of them in a drawer in my room: Numbers 1 to about 105, I think, after going down Wikie’s list and recalling with pleasure the many titles. Moby Dick, Westward Ho!, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, Two Years Before the Mast, The Moonstone . . . Title after title, engrossing story after engrossing story (the series went to 169 titles), all wonderfully filled with vivid, if rather slapdash, illustrations. Those comics led me to many of the books themselves as I was growing up. I’m sure they’ve led others.<br /><br />And oh, if only I’d kept them — they’d be worth thousands now, I imagine, on eBay. Instead, as I was about to leave for Navy boot camp in January 1955, or a couple of months later, as I was heading for San Francisco to wait for assignment to my first duty station, I gave them to my twin younger brothers, who in turn, I guess, gave them to our kid brother, who may have passed them on to friends . . . until, one by one or in bunches, they disappeared.<br /><br />Alas.Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-35715737777165292762009-06-03T14:24:00.000-07:002009-06-03T18:25:41.388-07:00Lunch in YelapaHere, in the winter of 2008, April is preparing our lunch on the back (kitchen) balcony of our rented place in the coastal village of Yelapa, just south of Puerto Vallarta, where we've gone to escape British Columbia's cold, gray months since 2005.<br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxhYA78M_8mt9zpZGXWEEYYfI2a3kwX-GqVcFxrg3CExlj4ngwj97CE-M1CqEiTD7XNwPlUEwdh4q5PwsPFYQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-19760933362328489372009-04-10T10:20:00.000-07:002009-07-21T14:04:31.346-07:00Another Winter in Yelapa<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIkzLvoYEO1gagcQdk_opTEUaCHn9Aw5u6mSLP1mwG31TGQ23QC9j8-MTF5-jS0nfN_n0Mb_xPKZhYB6AOP7uNh-rhzL84abKhOBol4fJkf9HKBDrw1imOCtkpKiN7mY7YNwhPp3N81h4/s1600-h/PICT3498.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5323116630503728530" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; width: 400px; cursor: pointer; height: 300px;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIkzLvoYEO1gagcQdk_opTEUaCHn9Aw5u6mSLP1mwG31TGQ23QC9j8-MTF5-jS0nfN_n0Mb_xPKZhYB6AOP7uNh-rhzL84abKhOBol4fJkf9HKBDrw1imOCtkpKiN7mY7YNwhPp3N81h4/s400/PICT3498.JPG" border="0" /></a>This was our fifth winter in Yelapa, the still pleasantly offbeat Mexican village some twenty miles south of Puerto Vallarta that, unless one has a vehicle and chooses to drive the twisting, dusty jungle road down from El Tuito to where it ends on the ridge above Yelapa, can only be reached by boat. The people who make that drive are mainly fliers who come down in trucks or SUVs with their paragliders; one sees these birdmen (and birdwomen) almost every day, soaring in the updrafts above the beach with the buzzards.<br /><br /></div><p>We arrived this time on New Year’s Eve, after flying into Vallarta on the 30th, and were in Yelapa until April 7th, when we flew back to Spokane, where we'd left our car, to spend the night there before driving to our home on Laird Creek outside Nelson, B.C. We got back to find, as we'd hoped, that spring had started in the West Kootenays.<br /><br />There were noticeably fewer tourists in Vallarta when we arrived at the end of last year; the bank on Insurrentes, for instance, where we use the ATM and ask for change afterwards, was virtually empty, whereas in other years one had to stand in a long line before reaching a teller.<br /><br />I went down this year sick with colitis, gambling that I’d get better in Yelapa’s <span style="font-style: italic;">muy tranquilo</span> atmosphere. And indeed I have gotten better — my diseased intestines are working again and I have my old energy back — after seeing a young Mexican iridologist and naturopathic doctor early in January in Vallarta who, after studying the photographs he took of my eyes, told me to avoid carbohydrates (including, except for small, occasional portions, even beans and rice, formerly one of our staples), stop enjoying those guilty pleasures I’ve long indulged in (sweets, alcohol, coffee), and put me on a strict diet of vegetables (mainly raw) and protein (mainly fish, a little chicken, no red meat). In addition, he prescribed a “liver cleanse” of the juice of three limes mixed with three teaspoons of olive oil each morning on an empty stomach, followed by three teaspoons before each meal of what he called “the scorpion,” a blended mixture of an entire glass of lime juice, seven cloves of garlic, a large red onion, and seven tablespoons of olive oil. Also lots of juices during the day. My wife April joined me in taking the liver cleanse each morning, as well as a dose of the scorpion.<br /><br />Through January and most of February I kept strictly to the doctor’s diet. Then gradually I began cheating a little. I started by enjoying a cup of coffee again — one only — with breakfast (helped me go!), and I graduated from there to having a drink now and then, usually a beer at Mimi’s or the at Yacht Club, and occasionally treated myself to a flan at the Pollo Bollo or the avocado pie at Tacos y Mas. Such periodic indulgences seemed to do me no harm, but I had to admit that old age had caught up with me, alas, and my intestines were tired, as the good doctor had informed me. I must more or less follow his diet, he said, for the rest of my life.<br /><br />Which thought reminds me of the end of the life, in January, of Yelapa’s great representative of its gringo community, and how “the rest” of one’s life can suddenly be very brief indeed.</p><p><br />Isabel Jordan was an American woman who had lived here since 1971 and was felt to embody the lively spirit of this tropical paradise by her fellow expatriates. Her Casa Isabel, which included, apart from her own palapa, a number of rental casitas, served as a retreat for winter vacationers, as well as a place to stay for her friends among the Huichol, natives of the mountains of central Mexico, when they came down to Yelapa to sell their beaded artwork or hold a sacred ceremony.<br /><br />Isabel was a student of the ancient culture of the Huichol, and she helped to preserve it by buying and selling their intricate and colorful art to galleries and at exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Europe.<br /><br />We missed seeing her this year, though we were in the habit of walking up to the Casa Isabel to pay our respects shortly after arriving. We might have seen her at the Yacht Club on New Year’s Eve (had we not stayed home and, tired from travel, gone to bed early), where doubtless she enjoyed the celebration. Part of Isabel’s legend is that she never missed a party.<br /><br />A few days after the New Year’s Eve party she went off on vacation to another part of Mexico where, in a freak accident, she fell and broke a couple of ribs that punctured her vital organs. We heard of the accident from our friend Paloma on January 9th, by which time Isabel was in intensive care in Puerto Vallarta. She died ten days later. She was 81, or perhaps had passed her 82nd birthday. By all accounts, she’d had a full, adventurous life.<br /><br />A memorial for her was held on the beach at the Lagunita Hotel in Yelapa on March 22nd, attended by one of her daughters and a brother, here from the States, and more than a hundred present and past members of the gringo colony, as well as Yelapa natives especially close to her. A Huichol shaman, in splendid traditional garb, was noticeably present.<br /><br />Chris the flyer (and pounding keyboard player at Mimi’s every Friday night), and his wife Beverly, flew tandem over the beach in his paraglider and cast rose petals into the air. And after everybody had filled up on the potluck food, a number of those who’d known her stepped up to the microphone to tell favorite stories about Isabel. Most touching was the cheerful email she wrote to a friend on New Year’s Day from Yelapa — read to us by an old friend — that was full of news and plans for the future (notably she was looking forward to watching Obama’s inauguration on television), full of life, in short, the life she was soon to lose.<br /><br />Apart from our usual activities down here — April’s QiGong and yoga, my writing, our afternoon walks, visiting with friends, sunbathing on the beach and occasional swims in the ocean, etc. — we took more side trips this year.<br /><br />Our first, which we take every year, was in mid-January to El Tuito, the mountain town above Vallarta and Yelapa’s government seat, for the Virgin of Guadalupe festival. It’s a spectacle that includes, in the morning, a procession carrying an effigy of the Virgin, Mexico’s patron saint, to the church, followed by, after dark, the fireworks in the churchyard in which a three-story bamboo tower strung with fireworks is lit, starting at the bottom and working up, to produce an awesome, twenty minutes or so display of blazing, hissing pinwheels, shooting, exploding rockets, and culminating with the entire top of the structure lifting off like a fiery magic carpet to rain bits of flaming debris on the delighted crowd and nearby buildings, resulting, it seems, in neither burned flesh nor property damage.<br /><br />As usual, we spent the night in a hotel in El Tuito and returned to Yelapa the next day. </p><p><br />A few days later we witnessed the <span style="font-style: italic;">quinceañera</span> of the fifteen-year-old daughter of the owner of Yelapa’s largest tienda (store), the largest celebration of its kind that the village had seen in a while. In Mexico a girl “comes out” at age fifteen in her quinceañera, which is put on, usually at great expense, by her parents or extended family. This one was for Iris, daughter of Hortensia, and began with the morning procession to the church for the ceremony there, followed by the evening reception, held in the village hall, at which virtually everyone in the village, Mexican and gringo alike, was served a free plate of chicken cordon bleu with mashed potatoes and a salad, deliciously provided by the Yacht Club, whose owner, Elena, is a family relative. As well, there was the traditional bottle of tequila on every table to wash your food down.<br /><br />Following the meal, projected onto a big screen in the hall, we were treated to a “home” movie starring the beautiful Iris performing before the camera — dancing by the sea, lolling on the rocks, striking sexy poses like a professional model in a shoot for a fashion magazine. It struck me that Mexican girls are more comfortable in their bodies than American or Canadian girls, or maybe it’s just that I haven’t been around many teenage girls lately.<br /><br />There was a series of robberies in Yelapa about this time (only the second such “wave” in the five years we’ve wintered here). The rumor was there were two “bandits” at work, one whose family in the village reportedly paid $10,000 to get him out of jail after he’d been turned in by an aunt for stealing from her and served a two-year stretch. Reportedly, he and another young man, also just out of jail, had returned to their burglarizing ways.<br /><br />Another rumor was that the culprits were non-local workers on the paths upriver, doing a little off-work moonlighting. In any case, and whoever they were, the thieves were hustled out of town by visiting police after giving some other young men the idea of doing a little breaking and entering themselves. These kids, so the story went, locals for sure, were taken upriver by “elders” concerned about the threat to tourism, forced to dig their own graves (in Mexico a classic intimidation, it seems), and told that if the robberies continued they’d be put into them.<br />Whatever the truth of this tale, there have been no further reports of robberies this winter.<br /><br />Toward the end of January we made contact with Gretchen and Glen Backus, friends from Nelson and members with April of the Nelson Choral Society, who were staying in a swanky hotel near the <span style="font-style: italic;">Los Muertos</span> pier in Vallarta; we got together with them and stayed overnight in their suite.<br /><br />Then, hardly an hour after our return from Vallarta the next day, who should show up at our door but my brother Mike! I hadn’t expected to see him this year, though he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife Araceli (mostly in Cabo San Lucas, sometimes in Guadalajara, where his wife is from) and had planned to meet us at the airport on our arrival and stay with us awhile. That was before hearing he’d lost all but some $40,000 of his 1.8 million-dollar fortune (acquired from the sale of his half of what had been our parents’ golf course outside Minneapolis) in the financial crash.<br /><br />Turned out his financial “guru” had been playing with his and other clients’ money — the news of which came out after he’d reportedly died in his sleep at age 38, probably of the stress of watching his crooked house of cards collapse. Subsequently, my brother learned the guy committed suicide, thus escaping prosecution and leaving his bilked clients high and dry.<br /><br />Anyway, since they were more or less in the neighborhood, Mike and Araceli drove down in their SUV from Guadalajara to Vallarta, and Mike came out to Yelapa, leaving his wife in the city with a couple of girlfriends, and stayed two nights with us. After that we went up to Guadalajara with Mike and Araceli and stayed two nights with them. While there drove to nearby Lake Chapala, where a lot of American and Canadian retirees have settled. Saw both places for the first time.<br /><br />Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, is immensely spread out with no tall buildings, it appeared, other than churches, museums and government structures (and they more massive than tall) — no buildings higher, I’d guess, than were in ancient Rome. The residential areas especially with their straight narrow streets lined with two- to four-story houses or apartment buildings, neat constructions of brightly painted (blue or yellow) cement, some very handsome in the Mediterranean style, reminded me of what remains of ancient Pompeii. Then too the vender trucks going by in the streets, as they do in most Mexican cities, loaded with plastic water jugs or metal cylinders of gas, and announcing their passage with recorded jingles, seemed like modern equivalents of what Seneca or Pliny the Younger must have known.<br /><br />I’d read that Lake Chapala — that is the lake itself — Mexico’s largest body of fresh water, is gradually being drained for irrigation and to provide water to the city of Guadalajara, but it’s still huge, stretching to the horizon from the city park where Mexican families were enjoying their Sunday off the day we visited there. I wondered how much had changed since D. H. Lawrence visited Lake Chapala in the mid-1920s.<br /><br />We were driven back to Vallarta by my brother and his wife and said goodbye to them. “We’ll try to visit you again before you leave Mexico,” Mike said, but I doubted that, and indeed it never happened. When last heard from, Mike was back in our native Minnesota, looking for a job on a golf course, and Araceli was in Cabo. His hope is to obtain a visa for Araceli so she can join him in the States, where he’s probably going to have to live from now on.<br /><br />The other places we visited this year — for the first time — were Moscota, a mountain town northeast of Puerto Vallarta, reached after a two and a half-hour bus ride, and Sayulita and San Poncho, both on the coast north of Vallarta.<br /><br />We went to Moscota on March 1 with our Yelapa friend Adrianna, a longtime resident in Mexico, and shared a room with her in an elegant old hotel for 350 pesos for the night — Sunday night in Moscota, where, in the town’s crowded plaza, we witnessed an age-old spectacle: a parade of young men and women, men on one side, women on the other, counter-circling the plaza’s promenade in order to display themselves to one other. One saw many significant exchanged glances, etc. (though we saw no examples of the practice we’ve heard about of young men throwing roses to the young women they fancied for the encouragement of having them picked up). We might have been in Spain or Italy two hundred years ago.<br /><br />On the bus the next day, heading back to Vallarta, I started to itch, and in our hotel that night in Vallarta, both April and I found ourselves infested with what we thought were bedbugs, probably picked up in our Moscota hotel.<br /><br />Back in Yelapa we were assured that the bites covering our bodies were from guinas, the tiny ticks you’ll encounter if you stray off the paths in tropical Mexico. Where had we got them? Probably in the overgrown ruins of the ancient church we explored in Moscota. We were careful not to leave any in our bed in our Vallarta hotel but found a few still on us when we got to Yelapa, sticky brown mites smaller than a kernel of rice that popped when you squeezed them. April found a bloated one the size of a ladybug on her groin. On advice from one of the villagers, we stripped and disinfected each other with a mixture of lime juice and rubbing alcohol, after which I carried our bedclothes and mattress onto our front balcony and sprayed them with Raid.<br /><br />We went twice to Pizota, the still “primitive,” mostly “unspoiled” village just south of Yelapa, a 15-minute boat ride around The Point and down the coast a short way, the first time in February with our friends Sophia and Earl and Lannis, then again in March with Sophia and some other people we got to know that day. More so even than Yelapa, Pizota could be on an island in the South Seas, with its sandy, palm-lined shore and thatched houses set back in the trees. Just getting off the panga in Pizota, rocking in the surf after the boat has nudged onto the sand (Pizota has no pier), is an adventure: you’re liable to get wet. And you’re for sure likely to get wet, possibly drenched, getting back on the boat after your visit, because it’ll be late afternoon and the sea will be high, and even though the boatman will have backed his panga onto the sand to make it easier for you to board, the waves will be coming in, right over the bow sometimes, and over those unfortunate enough to be sitting too close to the bow. I’ve seen people get washed off their seats.<br /><br />In mid-March we went with a Yelapa acquaintance to Sayulita, a coastal town less than a two-hour bus ride north of Vallarta, where who should we meet on the crowded beach but our friends Earl and Lannis, who’d left Yelapa a couple of days before to head slowly back to their St. Louis home. We stayed there only long enough to have lunch with them and to find Sayulita too loud and expensive and touristy, its main street being torn up to replace the old cobbles with smooth cement, the better to attract more tourists, probably, before hitching some two or three miles down the coast to even more expensive but much more attractive San Poncho (or San Francisco, if you prefer), charming, quieter, its side streets all nicely paved and tree-shaded — classy, in contrast to Sayulita’s apparent crassness and Yelapa’s funkiness. (Not that Yelapa doesn’t have pretensions, but they’re hardly on San Poncho’s level: in San Poncho they play polo, in Yelapa croquet.) Caught a ride with a friendly Mexican who, though he was heading to Vallarta, took us first in the opposite direction to San Poncho, where we meant to stay the night.<br /><br />We looked for the American expatriate called Joaquin, a landscape gardener we’d met in Yelapa early in our stay this year and who’d encouraged us to visit him in San Poncho and stay in his house. We didn’t find him. Instead we met a beautiful woman of early middle age named Mika. She looked like an upper-class Mexican or an old-time gringa but was, we learned, a Yaqui Indian, born in Sonora, Mexico, an ex-fashion designer, ex-model who’d lived in Europe, now living in Mexico, somewhat precariously, on her child support and from teaching yoga. She knew Joaquin and, took us in her car to where he lived in one of the Villas Paraiso, a lovely complex of white- stuccoed condominiums (known unofficially as the Taj Mahal) at the far end of the long, virtually empty beach past the town center, but he wasn’t there. He was golfing, we were told.<br /><br />We decided to wait for him, and to kill the time and at Mika’s assurance that it was all right, we swam with her and her twin boys in the Villas Paraiso’s swell pool. Before she and her boys left, Mika said that if we failed to find Joaquin, or otherwise couldn’t stay with him, we could stay with her.<br /><br />Joaquin never showed up, and anyway, after knocking at his door for the second time, we learned from one of his guests that there were three cats in his house. I have an asthmatic allergy to cats, so we decided to take up Mika’s offer. We found in a tent on the beach, ready to spend the night there with her boys. But she gave us the key to her place! Which turned out to be a small, two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment, neat and tidy, if a little stuffy, but we slept very well in her bed (her boys’ was a mattress on the floor in the next room) with a fan going all night.<br /><br />The next morning Mika appeared as we were having breakfast, and April went off with her to her yoga class. I stayed in the apartment, making use, at her invitation, of her laptop and high-speed Internet connection to check and reply to our e-mail.<br /><br />After she and April returned from yoga, Mika drove us to the highway outside town, where we caught the bus to Vallarta, and from there the bus to Boca, and finally the six o’clock boat to Yelapa.<br /><br />We had three weeks left here. They were soon gone. We didn't want to leave. But then, we never want to leave, while at the same time, after three months in this tropical paradise, we are ready to go home. We go with our memories of the place and the thought we'll be back next year.<br /><br />Morning in Yelapa: the drone of a panga’s outboard on the bay, the cackle of chachalacas (pheasant-like birds) in the trees, the crowing of roosters around the houses, the oi oi oi of a trogon (a colorful, shrike-like bird) in the jungle. The sun hot, just lifted over the mountains and shining through the east window in our bedroom. </p><p>We get up, do our morning ablutions, our exercises, on the flat roof of our place, April her QiGong, me my calisthenics. I finish with some pushups and situps, gradually increasing their number each morning. (When I started, after recovering my health this year, I could hardly do one pushup, and only a couple of situps; I can now, with some difficulty, do a dozen pushups and twenty situps, and note a gratifying firming up of my flaccid old body.)<br /><br />Then, following the “liver cleanse” of lime juice and olive oil that both April and I adhere to from Dr. Adrien’s diet, a breakfast of granola or scrambled eggs and a tortilla, with a cup of coffee for me (my only one of the day), and for both of us a fruit smoothie.<br /><br />Following breakfast, this was our routine over the three months:<br /><br />Three days a week, April went off to yoga in the village, leaving at 10 for the 10:30 class, while I, at least six days a week, set up my laptop on the front or back balcony (depending on the weather: the front is warmer on cool and cloudy days, the back cooler when it’s hot and sunny) to engage in my morning struggle with the novel I’m attempting to write.<br /><br />April’s return about 2 p.m. was my signal to stop writing and help prepare our lunch. Following lunch, soup and a salad, say, we usually read and napped, April in the hammock on our front balcony, me on the couch. Then we usually took a walk, upriver or along The Point, or to the playa, where we’d always find members of those among Yelapa’s gringo colony who frequent the beach, sitting around a table or two at one of the palapa restaurants enjoying the ocean breezes and drinking their afternoon margaritas, and where April sometimes joined the table of regulars playing Scrabble. Sometimes we swam off the playa, when there were no jellyfish in the water to sting you, and sometimes off Isabel’s little beach on The Point.<br /><br />Evenings we often ate at one of Yelapa’s restaurants, the <span style="font-size:0;">Pollo Bollo, Tacos y Mas</span> and <span style="font-size:0;">Brisas’</span> being our favorites. We ate at <span style="font-size:0;">El Manguito</span> upriver once or twice, and a couple of times at April’s (not my April’s) Passion Flower Gardens upriver, where there’s “dinner and a movie” Monday nights and <span style="font-style: italic;">La Noche Romantica</span> on Thursdays. We’d split one of April’s American-style meals there, or just the dessert (a piece of one of her decadent pies or cheesecakes).<br /><br />Wednesday and Saturday nights there was disco at the Yacht Club. Friday night was open-mike music at Mimi’s.<br /><br />Other nights we read or played the simple word game (for ages 8 to adult) called Quiddler, or cards — gin rummy, usually, after April taught me. Of the ten books I brought down with me this year, I read seven of them, including two fat biographies of writers William Humphrey and Richard Yates and Oakley Hall’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Warlock</span>, his fat, superb “western.” Now reading Malcolm Lowry’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Under the Volcano</span>, which I started and never finished almost thirty years ago, and as many stories as I can in Alice Munro’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Runaway</span> before having to return the book to Mimi’s lending library.<br /><br />April, more concerned than I am with health and “growth,” read books on somatics (re the mind’s control of movement, flexibility and health) and on neuro linguistic programming, most of the stories in Munro’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Runaway</span>, and has just completed <span style="font-style: italic;">The Shack</span>, a paperback bestseller about an encounter with God, and is now racing to complete <span style="font-style: italic;">The Book Thief</span>, another borrowed book, before we leave.<br /><br />As a final excursion, we hiked to the waterfall upriver this past Thursday — took an hour and 45 minutes under the hot sun or cool shade, depending on where the dusty path led us — and had the place to ourselves to go skinny dipping in the refreshing pool below the falls. Then stopped for the obligatory meal at Christina’s far upriver health food restaurant on the way back.<br /><br />As a contribution to the community, April and I helped in a garbage cleanup organized by Bob McCormick, a children’s book writer and longtime resident of Yelapa, along with a group of Yelapa children. Then April and I, with several kids, did a second cleanup. Garbage, ever a problem in Mexico, remains a problem in Yelapa.<br /><br />And as for the novel I’m working on, after two years of snail’s pace writing and rewriting, here and at home in B.C., I’ve compiled a rough 61,000 words (including many wrong turns or loose ends that must be fixed or tied up somehow), and I’m at the point where I might start working toward the book’s climax (I see it as a short novel of from 75,000 to 80,000 words), except that I laid it aside a couple of days ago to write this piece for my blog.<br /><br />On Palm Sunday, at the start of <span style="font-style: italic;">semana santa</span> (Holy Week), we watched the procession through Yelapa of palm-waving villagers following a man on a donkey to the church in a reenactment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The man portraying Jesus was none other than ascetic-looking, long-haired Tomás (Thomas, no doubt, to his American mother), a longtime gringo resident of Yelapa who, wrapped in a blue robe, was the very figure of the Messiah.<br /><br />Our last night in Yelapa we had our landlords, Emilio and Norma, and two of their three children, Nora and Omar (Emi was in Vallarta), for a farewell supper.<br /><br />The next morning Emilio, in two trips, carried our two heaviest pieces of luggage to the pier. We caught the 10:30 boat to Puerto Vallarta, flew out at 6 p.m. to Phoenix, and from there to Spokane. Drove home the next day.<br /><br />And so — next year in Yelapa!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">No adios</span>, as we told our friends here, <span style="font-style: italic;">pero hasta la vista.</span> </p>Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-12016988058833824492008-09-06T11:47:00.000-07:002009-04-20T10:25:21.791-07:00Author's RevisionsOne of the excruciating things about being an author -- especially a first-book author -- is to come across all the errors, typos, and just plain crudities in your first edition. One longs for a second edition of the book and the opportunity to correct its sometimes embarrassing imperfections.<br /><br />In line with the above, what follows is my current list of corrections. If you happen to own a copy of my book (<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Leaving the Farm</span>, Oolichan Books, 2007), please note them and forgive my mistrakes, for which I am entirely responsible.<br /><br />Note of explanation: In the case of revised paragraphs, one has to be careful to keep the same length as the original so as not to upset the book's page sequence. Hence the added word counts.<br /><br />REVISION (top of page 194):<br /><br />Original<br /><br />One day when we were out sliding there was another visitor at the Tysons’, a kid from Loretto named Rudy, who was one of those unfortunates among school children like the gamma member of a pack of wolves. He was the butt of jokes, and the Tysons especially teased him unmercifully. Having been teased and the butt of jokes myself, I felt sorry for Rudy. But then he seemed to ask for it by his craving for acceptance, his tail-between-his-legs hanging around alpha kids like the Tysons. It didn’t help matters that, besides wearing glasses, he had a whiney voice and was a bit of a sissy. [106 words]<br /><br />Revision<br /><br />It was a reckless ride, another of the Tysons’ initiations. One day a fresh initiate, a kid from Loretto named Rudy, joined us on the Tysons’ hill. In school, and especially with the Tysons, he was like the omega member of a pack of wolves. He was teased and the butt of jokes. Having been teased and the butt of jokes myself—having been, like him, a bottom dog—I could identify with Rudy. Why he hung around alpha kids like the Tysons, I suppose was because he wanted, as I did, their acceptance. It didn’t help matters that he wore glasses, seemed a bit of a sissy. [106 words]<br /><br />MOST IMPORTANT CHANGE (if revision of entire paragraph impossible):<br /><br />Page 194, first sentence: “. . . like the gamma member of a pack of wolves. . . . “ Change “gamma” to “omega.”<br /><br /><br />REVISION (bottom of page 64):<br /><br />Original<br /><br />L’Ange (spelled Lange by then) died in 1887, the same year my maternal grandfather was born. It was also the year that the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (the Soo Line) cut through the Hamel land below the settlement known then as Medina (the name of the township), constructed a depot, and named it Hamel. By that time hay was the family’s principal crop, and William Hamel and his sons were hauling it off the farm to sell to owners of horse-drawn vehicles in Minneapolis—to the streetcar company (until its cars were electrified), creameries and ice companies, and private owners of horses and buggies. [107 words]<br /><br />Revision<br /><br />L’Ange (spelled Lange by then) died in 1887, the same year my maternal grandfather was born. It was also the year that the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (the Soo Line) cut through the Hamel land below the settlement known then as Lenz (for Leonard Lenz, the postmaster), constructed a depot, and named it Hamel. By that time hay was the family’s principal crop, and William Hamel and his sons were hauling it off the farm to sell to owners of horse-drawn vehicles in Minneapolis—to the streetcar company (until its cars were electrified), creameries and ice companies, and private owners of horses and buggies. [107 words]<br /><br />REVISION (bottom of page 80):<br /><br />Original<br /><br />Together they watched Bobby Jones play in the St. Paul Open. My father played golf too, of course, once taking the lead and drawing a crowd in a tournament at Alexandria, Minnesota. But then: <em>I blew up under the pressure.</em> [40 words]<br /><br />Revision<br /><br />Together they watched Bobby Jones win the 1930 U.S. Open at the Interlachen Country Club in Edina. My father played golf too, of course, once taking the lead in a tournament at Alexandria, Minnesota. But then: <em>I blew up under the pressure.</em> [42 words]<br /><br />TYPOS<br /><br />Page 65, last paragraph: change Hennepin “Country” to “County.”<br /><br />Page 101, second paragraph, sentence beginning “The teacher was reading to us to one warm, sleepy afternoon . . . Delete second “to.”<br /><br />Pages 179-180: missing numbers<br /><br />Page 182, second to last paragraph: change “blwoing” to “blowing.”<br /><br />CORRECTIONS<br /><br />Page 55, second to last paragraph: change “only nineteen” to “twenty-two.”<br /><br />Page 61, first paragraph: change “nine years later” to “six years later.”<br /><br />Page 209, middle of last paragraph: change “on those long summer evenings” to “in . . .”Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-37349987784557660282008-09-02T22:34:00.000-07:002008-09-02T23:01:39.252-07:00Work and Play<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZmBqMhP7hUucOfkdNmw8gxxzYGyhVv1egz5YuLvaovM9wUi0sfG2ziom7nmuT2qGJ5eMWTQ3Xj6JpOyewMw8Zgt3AxYrGkqjHOmUaM2Oz0s_pOnUM6DAa6EONrLzUH5hNT3rMwqsUHJQ/s1600-h/PICT1988.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241671066661845778" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZmBqMhP7hUucOfkdNmw8gxxzYGyhVv1egz5YuLvaovM9wUi0sfG2ziom7nmuT2qGJ5eMWTQ3Xj6JpOyewMw8Zgt3AxYrGkqjHOmUaM2Oz0s_pOnUM6DAa6EONrLzUH5hNT3rMwqsUHJQ/s400/PICT1988.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><div>More than half this year has passed since my last posting. My excuse is that I'm anything but prolific, have only so much time and energy to sit at my computer, and most damnably this poor scribbler has only so many words and ideas in his head. What I have I've been putting into the novel I've been working on since last winter in Mexico and, intermittently, this spring and summer in my home here in southeastern British Columbia.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>I say intermittently because real life, including "real" work, has a way of intruding on my literary labors when I'm not happily in Mexico on my annual <em>working</em> vacation. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div>What's more, there's play, as well as work, involved in the real life I share with my beloved partner. Periodically, my wife "nags" me into getting off my butt and out into the surrounding mountains with her for said play.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>April and I happen to belong to a hiking club, which every other week or so gets us, along with our fellow members (most of whom are, like us, retired, and therefore free to take off in the middle of a given week), into one of the West Kootenay's prime, and more or less easily accessible, wilderness areas. Recently we spent two days and nights up in nearby Kokanee Glacier Park, enjoying the amenities of the Alpine Club of Canada "hut," really a splendid lodge, on Kokanee Lake at its elevation of some 7,000 feet. And just a week ago we hiked into Monica Meadows, in the alpine north of Duncan Lake, which was the highlight of our high-country excursions this summer.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Above is a view of Monica Meadows. We'd like to hike up there once more before the snow flies.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Meanwhile, tonight is chilly enough that we've made a fire in our woodstove. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Summer is definitely over. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div>Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8429504746183139232.post-22127553579952861482008-01-25T11:07:00.000-08:002008-01-25T11:19:22.917-08:00Hola from Yelapa<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3_KUDWvcgh6qoREbGhaspD2Gp5eio2W-AN7Mn2mK-a7dTB2ly5AXYwjrn09sbGHVvCnAV4Hl1iJiDRkJ6FI1tGGVhR-ozsz8Nh3nizj4Rx4DCM5522GpFbzx2_6l2NCJs9hRnQVffbTY/s1600-h/PICT0489.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5159495548803102530" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3_KUDWvcgh6qoREbGhaspD2Gp5eio2W-AN7Mn2mK-a7dTB2ly5AXYwjrn09sbGHVvCnAV4Hl1iJiDRkJ6FI1tGGVhR-ozsz8Nh3nizj4Rx4DCM5522GpFbzx2_6l2NCJs9hRnQVffbTY/s400/PICT0489.JPG" border="0" /></a> About time I wrote from our winter retreat in Mexico. We’ve been here in Yelapa, just south of Puerto Vallarta, since 13 December and only lately have we begun to experience tropical warmth. From late December until the beginning of this week, daytime temperatures were pleasant enough, but at night it dipped into the 50s and we huddled under two heavy blankets at bedtime. Old residents here said they’d never experienced such cold, even around Christmas, when you expect it to be a little chilly. Global "warming"? Probably. Anyway, it’s finally beach weather during the day (not that we go to the beach that much), and the nights are warm enough now for us to sit comfortably on our back balcony without having to wear a jacket or sweater and play cards. Whereas just days ago we had to close ourselves up in our "guest" bedroom and burn candles for a little heat. At last, the kind of weather we came down here for.<br /><br /><div>This is our fourth winter in Yelapa and we’re now accepted as bonafide members of the gringo colony here. This was impressed upon us when, a couple of weeks ago, we were invited, along with the rest of the colony and a number of locals, to the wedding of a North American resident and his longtime Latina partner. And a muy grande wedding it was, with a reception on the patio of the couple’s waterfront palapa, followed by the nondenominational service and champagne for toasting. We then adjourned to the Yacht Club (a restaurant and disco, not an actual yacht club) for chicken cordon bleu and pieces of the giant wedding cake. Then dancing into the wee hours, from which we excused ourselves about 11.<br /></div><br /><div>The other event we’ve enjoyed since arriving this year was a quinseanera (the traditional "coming out" of a Mexican girl on her 15th birthday), which we attended on my 73rd birthday, at a rancho upriver from the central village. The corral there had been swept clean of horse and cattle dung and tables and chairs set up around the perimeter. An awning festooned with balloons was strung over the corner of the corral nearest the path up from the village, and here we found the proud mother sitting with her female relatives and friends. Across the corral a couple of young men were putting together the sound system, from which presently ear-blasting Mexican music would emanate. To the left of us, just off the corral fence, two or three older men were working around half of a 50-gallon drum, cut lengthwise to form an oversized brazier, setting it up and building a fire in it to form the coals over which seasoned, delicious strips of beef would be roasted to be served along with rice and vegetables and tortillas after the coming-out ceremony. There would be a bottle of tequila on each table, and Coke or Pepsi for mix or drinking alone.<br /></div><br /><div>I should say we’d been invited to the affair by the girl’s mother, who knew April from having cut her hair last year, when she stopped to chat with her on our way to the waterfall upriver with our son and his family during their two-week stay with us. And I should say also that we met an interesting older couple at the affair, a documentary filmmaker named William (‘Bill") Livingston and Guadalupe, his Mexican wife. We’ve since visited their palapa up in the jungle above the playa (the beach) and have watched DVD copies of four of his documentaries, lent to us by Bill, on my laptop computer. The best of them is an award-winning National Geographic documentary called "The Great Indian Railway"—about the railroads in India. The others are on Mexico, Italy and Russia, all enjoyable. He’s quite a character, has traveled the world over and made lots of money, I gather, which is rapidly dwindling, he says, because of the falling stock market. Guadalupe ("Lupe") is a photographer in her own right and Bill’s assistant. She’s beautiful, from Mexico City, where she still has family.<br /></div><br /><div>The quinseanera ceremony was touching. Six young men dressed in boots and straw sombreros escorted the girl around the corral (it was dark by now, but a couple of flood lights somewhat lit the place), and at one point lifted her up for the crowd of us hundred or so onlookers and passed her from hand to hand over their heads like a prize to be shown off.</div><div><br />Earlier a platform of boards had been laid on the dirt of the corral, and now the girl was seated in a chair on the platform for the symbolic exchange of her girl’s flat-soled shoes for a woman’s high heels—in this case, a pair of fancy boots. The girl’s mother, I think (the lighting made it difficult to tell), performed the change of footwear, while soft, romantic music played out of the speakers behind her.<br /></div><div>Then the girl stood in her grownup boots to dance with her father, then her godfather, and any number of uncles, cousins and friends of the family, each cutting in to the other. This was still going on when the food began to be served. We sat at a table with the filmmaker and his wife and tried to talk as we ate, but the loud music had started up again and we gave up. We left together about 10, the fiesta starting to crank up, and walked by flashlight back to the village. We parted with the couple where they began the climb to their casa after instructing us how to find it and inviting us to visit sometime.<br /></div><br /><div>April and I went on to the Yacht Club where, at April’s instigation, I was treated to a pot-banging announcement of my birthday, a group singing of "Happy Birthday," and a big piece of delicious cake on a plate decorated with flowers and a candle, compliments of the management.<br /></div><br /><div>A special day in this special place. </div>Laird Creek Scribblerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14814773138514920102noreply@blogger.com1