Me (left) June and Armando, our guide. No illegals coming across, no drugs, no cartel soldiers, but this was in the middle of really bad territory. Nothing on this side or the other. This was in Big Bend, last March. Still, I’m surprised at the loneliness, lack of activity, lack of people. Here it’s a shallow river and Armando grazes his horses on the other side where there is better grass. Nobody bothers him. April got this picture on her iPad.

This is April on Indira, her Andalusian, as we were coming up the Blue Creek trail.

Was surprised to learn that Minecraft was one of the top popular video games. I thought it would be Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, one of those. Not so. The graphics of Minecraft are not even that engaging, or realistic, but clearly the game pattern of activity is. You get to do stuff. You think it all up yourself. You deal with lego-blocky mobbed zombies on your own. Terrible thoughts occur to you and you mow down Things with clunky Lego swords or perhaps throw up a bricky castle for defense and then go somewhere (I think) and gather strange squared foods and just in general live it up in terms of agency.

Interesting. I don’t play video games and actually don’t know anyone who does but I have been taken by the plots, and especially the comments on the games. I am heartened by the knowledge many of these young gamers have in terms of workable plots, characterization and narrative drive. Their criticism and comments concern all of the above and are very expert, knowing.

The one time I played it was Mortal Kombat with my grandson. He was terrible at it. I was visiting them in Maryland and tried to think about some way I could relate to Jimmy (James Robert Johnson III) and he said he wasn’t allowed to have Mortal Kombat but he had borrowed it from a friend. My DIL was gone so I said, ‘Come on, I’ll play with you’.

So I tore off his arms and legs and threw him over a cliff. We had a great time, especially since I won.

Marrying this person was probably the best thing that ever happened to me other than writing Enemy Women. The fact that he is now an ex is totally beside the point. I learned enormous amounts about the military, about war, about combat from him. He made his way up from a private in the Texas National Guard to a Lieutenant-Colonel in the regular Army. Partly because he saw a lot of combat in Vietnam, was awarded the Silver Star, Purple Heart and Bronze star twice with V device. He spoke Vietnamese and fought with an ARVN unit for a year and then with the Cav for six months. I did a lot of listening. Altered old ideas, understood so much more about human nature.

If it hadn’t been for him I would have made terrible and embarrassing mistakes in Enemy Women. I have had people tell me, ‘Those are the best combat scenes I have ever read’. Well, if they are accurate, it is because of Jim. Not only accurate but plausible.

His first wife, who died long before we met, was from a fascinating Texas family and I researched her genealogy for the grandkids. Related to the first Spanish families to come to San Antonio in 1733, the Leal Goraz family. Many stories about them from Nanny (Hilburn) Sutherland. By accident I found in the Bexar County Archives, San Antonio, the marriage license of Richard Hilburn III (a cattleman) and Maria Luisa Leal, 1857. Her description and that of her ancestors all recorded by the Cathloic Church (San Fernando archives) — Gray eyes, dark curly hair. They considered themselves a people apart. Spanish, not Mexican. Gave me the backstory for News Of The World. I also found Hilburn’s road brand in the Pioneer Museum.

Jim’s family was from Wyoming, They too were ranchers. His father joined the U. S. 12th Cavalry and was assigned to Fort Clark, on the Mexican border, 1927. Then Jim was born in Fort Brown (now Brownsville, TX, the old fort recently demolished). There is a photo of Jim at age three standing to watch his father’s troop ride past, their machine guns disassembled and packed on mules, along with the ammunition, in the Fort Brown parade ground. What I learned from him and his father’s stories helped me with Color Of Lightning as well as News Of The World.

Also through Jim I met, years ago, WW2 vets from the Texas National Guard, his old friends (much older than him but they always showed up at the summer exercises and he admired them) and listened to their stories of Monte Cassino, the raid over the Rapido River. I mean, I sat and listened while they and Jim talked. They would never let me record them or write anything down. Most of them are gone now. Learned a lot. I was so lucky.

This is Jim and I on our last trip to Mexico to visit with the marvelous Contreras family. I guess they could be considered middle-class, as the whole great extended family has gone into the professions; lawyers, architects, teachers, Jaime is an electrical engineer and worked on Mexico’s only nuclear power plant, El Farrallon. This was taken halfway up the peak called El Cofre De Perote — you can drive up it — which ends up in fog and chill at 14,000 feet but you don’t think you’re that high, it doesn’t seem that high, there’s still vegetation — this is the tropics after all — and I nearly croaked from altitude sickness. I thought I would die. I felt ninety years old. Jim and Julio were leaping about like mountain goats.

Flowery meadows halfway up, and (below) on the peak itself people live year-round to tend to the satellite communications equipment on the peak.

Afterwards Julio took us to the maximum security prison Fortaleza San Carlos. A friend of his from the university was warden there. Poor guy hated it. He had just graduated as a lawyer and was assigned there whether he liked it or not. We got a tour, accompanied by about ten guards. The place was built in 1720 or so.

Another story. So many stories.

If it had not been for Jim I wouldn’t have heard any of these stories, or known anything about the 12th Cav., or how one gets a Silver Star, or heard someone explain the six tones of Vietnamese, or gone up Perote, or explored abandoned haciendas on Mexico’s east coast, or been escorted around an ancient fortress by ten guards to glance uneasily at men who were caged killers.

So many stories, one devolving into the next.

The abandoned hacienda called La Orduna 

Abandoned haciendas, Mexico’s eastern coast, near Jalapa, Veracruz state.

Staying with aforementioned friends in Coatepec, on the East Coast of Mexico (about thirty miles inland from Jalapa) — the Contreras family —- I had some time to myself while Jim and others of the family went to Zempoala. Julio Sr. told me about these hacienda main houses that still stood after their lands were taken away. So I took my camera and went to explore them. This one I slipped under a back gate made of chain link. Nobody saw me go in so I figured I was safe for the afternoon.

This one was from an estate that had comprised 10,000 hectares. All that remains is about an acre around this main hacienda house. The hacienda was called La Orduna (tilda over the N, can’t figure out how to do it)  and belonged to a family called Pascal. It was renovated 1907 but I couldn’t find out how old the main building was.

The land was confiscated by the revolutionary government (probably under Madero, about 1920?) and given out to — who knows. Who knows who ended up with the land. At any rate, all that was left of this great estancia was the main house.

ZIMPIZAHUA

This one, Zimpizahua, is renovated and has been made into a hotel and restaurant. It’s just outside Coatepec. I drove the old Ford pickup there by myself, my (now ex) husband still being gone with the others to Zempoala.

Gorgeous place. Camera-ready

That translates as ‘friends and guests, thus we work, thus we progress. the beautiful Zimpizahua — and all who live here—give you our very best welcome. Excuse the renovations’ . I suppose they’re trying to make it pay? Who knows. No idea who owns it. There’s not a lot of tourism on Mexico’s east coast.  You see a lot of places like this — gorgeous, open to tourism, and no tourists. No nobody. Nothing going on. Nada. ??

Zimpizahua used to be a huge sugar plantation but now they only grow about eighty hectares of sugar cane (all the land that was left to them) not for sugar but for forage for cows. I suppose it doesn’t affect them. I know you can’t feed a horse sugar-cane stalks or leaves. This was the pool and aqueduct for the overshot sugar mill wheel. It’s now run off to one side.

Stairway to the roof where the aqueduct ran (don’t ask me how).

So I just climbed right on up. Nobody there to stop me or say no. I think I could have gone into the restaurant and cooked myself lunch. Here’s the tile roof and an ancient hacienda bell with the date 1819 on it.

In the distance, which this photo doesn’t show, is the peak of Orizaba, 19,000 feet, a snow-cone. I had friends who climbed it, they said it was horrible, the snow was rotten and untrustworthy all the way to the top, dangerous. So it is with snowcapped mountains in tropical zones. But is it ever gorgeous.

Jim and I, driving around when we lived there in ’98, found other ruined hacienda main houses, some mere walls, very old. We stopped at one place up farther in the mountains where the vines had nearly obscured old walls, and the people in the tiny village there told us the names of the owners (I forget), complained that they never came back any more (ya think?) and somehow managed to convey that the hacienda owners  had a duty — noblesse oblige — to the people of the village and were neglecting this duty.

There is some effort to place and classify the old haciendas; Jaime Sr. (the architect) gave me this survey — it’s from a large book, he Xeroxed most of it for me. Very considerate. wish we had had time to explore more of these.

These tunes are hard to learn; Irish music is unexpected, with odd intervals, a phrase goes on longer and to odder places than one would think. Learning The Barney Pilgrim on my D whistle I have to memorize every note exactly, it doesn’t just fall into place as would, say, ‘Hard Times’. I wonder how old the Irish tunes are. Was watching a Youtube video on Aurignacian archaeological digs in France, and one of the archaeologists had made an exact replica of a bone flute that had been recovered —- 20,000 years old. Or more. It was holed exactly for the pentatonic scale. He played the first few bars of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ on it. That astounds me.  Back to Barney Pilgrim on this hot day (102), staying in the house except to go out and move the hose around from tree to tree.

And that kid has eight fingers on the whistle but in reality Irish whistles have only six holes. Details, details.

Reading blogs of some other authors I realize I am not much of a self-promoter. At one time I came up with a list of great ideas for self-promotion and sat there and looked at the list for a long time and then finally went back to writing my writing.

I am not making fun of authors who are good at it. No more than I would make fun of people who are good at sailing or water-colors or target shooting. I start out well and then I don’t have my heart in it. Wish I could sail, paint in water-colors, hit a target. Only with great effort.

Maybe if it weren’t so hot…

Hitting 100 every day and sometimes over — 102, 103. I am going through the last pass on News of the World and hope the editors don’t kill me for adding just one more sentence. Noticed a really bad, abrupt transition when the Captain is finishing up his reading in Spanish Fort and Simon the fiddler runs in and tells him the girl has run away, gone missing, perhaps kidnapped. I need something for the transition between the moment the Captain hears this, and when he and Simon are out looking for her. There isn’t anything. It howls for a transitive moment. So that’s my job for today, one sentence.

CHAPTER ONE

Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870

Captain Kidd laid out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment. He had been born in 1798 and the third war of his lifetime had ended five years ago and he hoped never to see another but now the news of the world aged him more than time itself. Still he stayed his rounds, even during the cold spring rains. He had been at one time a printer but the war had taken his press and everything else, the economy of the Confederacy had fallen apart even before the surrender and so he now made his living in this drifting from one town to another in North Texas with his newspapers and journals in a waterproof portfolio and his coat collar turned up against the weather. He rode a very good horse and was concerned that someone might try to take the horse from him but so far so good. So he had arrived in Wichita Falls on February 26^th and tacked up his posters and put on his reading clothes in the stable. There was a hard rain outside and it was noisy but he had a good strong voice.

He shook out the Journal’s pages.

The Fifteenth Amendment, he read, which has just been signed between the several states February 3^rd, 1870, allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servitude. He looked up from the text. His reading glasses caught the light. He bent slightly forward over the lectern. That means colored gentlemen, he said. Let us have no vaporings or girlish shrieks. He turned his head to search the crowd of faces turned up to him. I can hear you muttering, he said. Stop it. I hate muttering.

He glared at them and then said, Next. The Captain shook out another newspaper. The latest from the New York Herald Tribune states that the polar exploration ship Hansa is reported by a whaler as being crushed in sunk in the pack ice in its attempt to reach the North Pole; sunk at seventy degrees north latitude off Greenland. There is nothing in this article about survivors. He flipped the page impatiently.

The Captain had a clean-shaven face with runic angles, his hair was perfectly white and he was still six feet tall. His hair shone in the single hot ray from the bull’s-eye lantern. He carried a short-barreled Slocum revolver in his waistband at the back. It was a five-shot, thirty-two caliber and he had never liked it all that much but then he had rarely used it.

Over all the bare heads he saw Britt Johnson and his men, Paint Crawford and Dennis Vesey, at the back wall. They were free black men. Britt was a freighter and the other two were his driving crew. They held their hats in their hands, each with one booted foot cocked up against the wall behind them. The hall was full. It was a broad open space used for wool storage and community meetings and for people like himself. The crowd was almost all men, almost all white. The lantern lights were harsh, the air was dark. Captain Kidd traveled from town to town in north Texas with his newspapers and read aloud the news of the day to assemblies like this in halls or churches for a dime a head. He traveled alone and had no one to collect the dimes for him but not many people cheated and if they did somebody caught them at it and grabbed them by the lapels and wrenched them up in a knot and said You really ought to pay your goddamned dime, you know, like everybody else.

And then the coin would ring in the paint can.

#

He glanced up to see Britt Johnson lift a forefinger to him. Captain Kidd gave one brief nod, and completed his reading with an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer concerning the British physicist James Maxwell and his theories of electromagnetic disturbances in the ether whose wavelengths were longer than infrared radiation. This was to bore people and calm them down and put them into a state of impatience to leave; leave quietly. He had become impatient of trouble and other people’s emotions. His life seemed to him thin and sour, a bit spoiled, and it was something that had only come upon him lately. A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude. He was always impatient to get the readings over with now.

The Captain folded the papers, put them in his portfolio. He bent to his left and blew out the bull’s eye lantern. As he walked through the crowd people reached out to him and shook his hand. A pale-haired man sat watching him. With him were two Indians or half-Indians that the Captain knew for Caddoes and not people of a commendable reputation. The man with the blond hair turned in his chair to stare at Britt. Then others came to thank the Captain for his readings, asked after his grown children. Kidd nodded, said tolerable, tolerable, and made his way back to Britt and his men to see what it was Britt wanted.

#

Captain Kidd thought it was going to be about the Fifteenth Amendment but it was not.

Yes sir, Captain Kidd, would you come with me? Britt straightened and lifted his hat to his head and so did Dennis and Paint. Britt said, I got a problem in my wagon.

She seemed to be about ten years old, dressed in the horse Indians’ manner in a deerskin shift with four rows of elk teeth sewn across the front. A thick blanket was pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was the color of maple sugar and in it she wore two down puffs bound onto a lock of her hair by their minute spines and also bound with a thin thread was a wing-feather from a golden eagle slanting between them. She sat perfectly composed, wearing the feather and a necklace of glass beads as if they were costly adornments. Her eyes were blue and her skin that odd bright color that occurs when fair skin has been burnt and weathered by the sun. She had no more expression than an egg.

I see, said Captain Kidd. I see.

Continue reading →

And Happy Canada Day dear friends up there in the True North Strong and Free!

I am rereading Nicholas Nickleby, and I think that it is very close to being my favorite of all Dicken’s  books. Tale of Two cities and The Pickwick Papers are at about the same level all jostling for top place. It’s because Nicholas is so assertive, clever, fast, kind, and sometimes truly wild. He’s a sort of action hero, written by a master. Several blog posts ago I wrote about re-reading Great Expectations and finding to my astonishment that I didn’t really like it any more. Well, I didn’t like Pip, and realized that in my first reading I had merely tolerated him for the sake of the great minor characters

When assaulted or those he loves are assaulted NN replies in kind, In any way he can, as fast as he can, as long as he can. So with the arrangements of a very good plot NN becomes a fast rocket through the entanglements of money and injustice and cruelty to the helpless. This makes him a hero figure. Therefore he is good to read about, and also, therefore, he is intelligent.

I wish I could find the article about Stupid Plots. At any rate, the upshot of it was, a Stupid Plot requires really stupid characters that could have solved the whole problem in a day if they hadn’t been so stupid. A moderately intelligent person could have figured their way out of the entanglements of  a Stupid Plot in even less than a day. Hours.

So writers who are poor at plots must necessarily have really dense characters and we tire of reading about really dense characters. Idiot, just get in the car and go to your friend’s house and hide in the bushes and find out what’s really happening. But nooooooo. Stupidman has to stare stupidly at a text message, call up somebody else, cry out, ‘Can there really be a killer on the loose near Tom’s house?’ And then call up the police and when the police brush him off, then check the FBI wanted files on line and then call up Susan and say ‘Susan, do you think Tom is having a psychotic episode?’ and on and on.

NN constantly surprises us with this assertiveness, his rightness. When he is with an actor’s troupe, and another actor, a bully, threatens NN and his friend the poor retarded little Smike, NN walks up to the bully and knocks him down. So that took care of that. On to other problems.

so I am enjoying it very much.

http://woodwardonwords.blogspot.com/

This is the link to my friend Caroline Woodward’s blog on writing; she and husband Jeff are lighthouse keepers off the cost of British Columbia and Jeff got the most incredible pictures of a bald eagle capturing a large, dark bird on the sea surface and then actually rowing. rowing I say, with its wings in order to drag its prey back to shore. I copied his shots and now I have lost them. They are in this computer somewhere, rowing away. Will try again.

So there they are, inexpertly done. Good way to find Woody’s writing and Jeff’s photos is just use Google or Bing images and type in her name. you get Jeff’s pictures as an extra added bonus.  A visit to their light station was one of the inspirations for Lighthouse Island. Back to my irish tin whistle practice. I sit on the front porch or pace up and down whistling away and the dog and the cat run for cover. Pam Crane and I are doing the intro to our Civil War Songs performance, she’s on the Irish tambor and me on whistle doing ‘Come To The Bower’, so look out Celtic Chieftans!